Movie Script Summarization as Graph-based Scene Extraction

In this paper we study the task of movie script summarization, which we argue could enhance script browsing, give readers a rough idea of the script’s plotline, and speed up reading time. We formalize the process of generating a shorter version of a screenplay as the task of finding an optimal chain of scenes. We develop a graph-based model that selects a chain by jointly optimizing its logical progression, diversity, and importance. Human evaluation based on a question-answering task shows that our model produces summaries which are more informative compared to competitive baselines.