MovieSum: An Abstractive Summarization Dataset for Movie Screenplays

Rohit Saxena, Frank Keller


Abstract
Movie screenplay summarization is challenging, as it requires an understanding of long input contexts and various elements unique to movies. Large language models have shown significant advancements in document summarization, but they often struggle with processing long input contexts. Furthermore, while television transcripts have received attention in recent studies, movie screenplay summarization remains underexplored. To stimulate research in this area, we present a new dataset, MovieSum, for abstractive summarization of movie screenplays. This dataset comprises 2200 movie screenplays accompanied by their Wikipedia plot summaries. We manually formatted the movie screenplays to represent their structural elements. Compared to existing datasets, MovieSum possesses several distinctive features: 1) It includes movie screenplays which are longer than scripts of TV episodes. 2) It is twice the size of previous movie screenplay datasets. 3) It provides metadata with IMDb IDs to facilitate access to additional external knowledge. We also show the results of recently released large language models applied to summarization on our dataset to provide a detailed baseline.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.239
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4043–4050
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.239
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.239
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rohit Saxena and Frank Keller. 2024. MovieSum: An Abstractive Summarization Dataset for Movie Screenplays. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 4043–4050, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MovieSum: An Abstractive Summarization Dataset for Movie Screenplays (Saxena & Keller, Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.239.pdf