Automated Screenplay Annotation for Extracting Storytelling Knowledge

Abstract

Narrative screenplays follow a standardized format fortheir parts (e.g., stage direction, dialogue, etc.) including short descriptions for what, where, when, and howto film the events in the story (shot headings). We created a grammar based on the syntax of shot headings toextract this and other discourse elements for automatic screenplay annotation. We test our annotator on over a thousand raw screenplays from the IMSDb screenplay corpus and make the output available for narrative intelligence research.