Screenplay Summarization Using Latent Narrative Structure

Most general-purpose extractive summarization models are trained on news articles, which are short and present all important information upfront. As a result, such models are biased by position and often perform a smart selection of sentences from the beginning of the document. When summarizing long narratives, which have complex structure and present information piecemeal, simple position heuristics are not sufficient. In this paper, we propose to explicitly incorporate the underlying structure of narratives into general unsupervised and supervised extractive summarization models. We formalize narrative structure in terms of key narrative events (turning points) and treat it as latent in order to summarize screenplays (i.e., extract an optimal sequence of scenes). Experimental results on the CSI corpus of TV screenplays, which we augment with scene-level summarization labels, show that latent turning points correlate with important aspects of a CSI episode and improve summarization performance over general extractive algorithms, leading to more complete and diverse summaries. Victim: Mike Kimble, found in a Body Farm. Died 6 hours ago, unknown cause of death. CSI discover cow tissue in Mike's body. Cross-contamination is suggested. Probable cause of death: Mike's house has been set on fire. CSI finds blood: Mike was murdered, fire was a cover up. First suspects: Mike's fiance, Jane and her ex-husband, Russ. CSI finds photos in Mike's house of Jane's daughter, Jodie, posing naked. Mike is now a suspect of abusing Jodie. Russ allows CSI to examine his gun. CSI discovers that the bullet that killed Mike was made of frozen beef that melt inside him. They also find beef in Russ' gun. Russ confesses that he knew that Mike was abusing Jody, so he confronted and killed him. CSI discovers that the naked photos were taken on a boat, which belongs to Russ. CSI discovers that it was Russ who was abusing his daughter based on fluids found in his sleeping bag and later killed Mike who tried to help Jodie. Russ is given bail, since no jury would convict a protective father.