Narrative theme navigation for sitcoms supported by fan-generated scripts

  • Authors:

  • Gerald Friedland;Luke Gottlieb;Adam Janin

  • Affiliations:

  • International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA;International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA;International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The following article provides the definitive description of the complete Joke-O-Mat system to navigate sitcoms as presented briefly in Friedland et al. (2009) and extended in Janin et al. (2010), which was augmented with fan-generated scripts as described in Friedland et al. (2010). The system with the extension allows a user to browse a sitcom by scene, punchline, and dialog segment, and to filter these themes by actor and by keyword. For example, the user can choose to watch only punchlines by the character "Kramer" that contain the word "armoire". The system infers the narrative themes and provides word-level search by automatically aligning the output of a speaker identification system and a speech recognizer to both closed captions and scripts generated by fans on the Internet. The segmentations produced by this system have proven to be indistinguishable from expert-generated segmentations, and require significantly less time to produce. The article describes the original and the extended Joke-O-Mat ( http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/jokeomat/ ) system, discusses problems with the use of fan-generated content, and presents results on episodes from the sitcom Seinfeld with regards to segmentation accuracy and overall user satisfaction as determined by a human-subject study.