Mirella Lapata

Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

What’s this movie about? Automatic Content Analysis and Summarization

Movie analysis is an umbrella term for many tasks aiming to automatically interprete, extract, and summarize the content of a movie. Potential applications include generating shorter versions of scripts to help with the decision making process in a production company, enhancing movie recommendation engines by abstracting over specific keywords to more general concepts (e.g., thrillers with psychopaths), and notably generating movie previews. In this talk I will illustrate how NLP-based models together with video analysis can be used to facilitate various steps in the movie production pipeline. I will formalize the process of generating a shorter version of a movie as the task of finding an optimal chain of scenes and present a graph-based model that selects a chain by jointly optimizing its logical progression, diversity, and importance. I will then apply this framework to screenplay summarization, a task which could enhance script browsing and speed up reading time. I will also show that by aligning the screenplay to the movie, the model can generate movie previews with minimal modification. Finally, I will discuss how the computational analysis of movies can lead to tools that automatically create movie "profiles" which give a first impression of the movie by describing its plot, mood, location, or style.

Joakim Nivre

Department of Linguistics and Philology - Uppsala University

Reflections on Universal Dependencies

Universal Dependencies is a framework for cross-linguistically consistent Treebank annotation that has so far been applied to over 50 languages. It was developed primarily to support multilingual parsing research, but the resources have proven useful for a wide range of studies that were not foreseen originally, including research on language typology. In this talk, I will give a general introduction to Universal Dependencies and the resources developed in the project, and survey a number of representative examples of how the resources have been put to use in different scientific investigations. I will conclude with some reflections on how Universal Dependencies relate to linguistic theory, on the one hand, and parsing technology, on the other.