Analysing Film Content: A Text-Based Approach
A. Vassiliou · Surrey Research Insight Open Access (The University of Surrey) · 2006
The aim of this work is to bridge the semantic gap with respect to the analysis of film content. Our novel approach is to systematically exploit collateral texts for films, such as audio description scripts and screenplays. We ask three questions: first, what information do these texts provide about film content and how do they express it? Second, how can machine-processable representations of film content be extracted automatically in these texts? Third, how can these representations enable novel applications for analysing and accessing digital film data? To answer these questions we have analysed collocations in corpora of audio description scripts (AD) and screenplays (SC), developed and evaluated an information extraction system and outlined novel applications based on information extracted from AD and SC scripts. We found that the language used in AD and SC contains idiosyncratic repeating word patterns, compared to general language. The existence of these idiosyncrasies means that the generation of information extraction templates and algorithms can be mainly automatic. We also found four types of event that are commonly described in audio description scripts and screenplays for Hollywood films: Focus_of_Attention, Change_of_Location, Non-verbal_Communication and Scene_Change events. We argue that information about these events will support novel