Analyzing Film Adaptation through Narrative Alignment

Tanzir Pial, Shahreen Salim Aunti, Charuta Pethe, Allen Kim, Steven Skiena

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper

Submission Track: NLP Applications

Keywords: Text Alignment, Book Movie Alignment

TL;DR: We analyze the book to film adaptation process through aligning source book text with the the film adaptation's script.

Abstract: Novels are often adapted into feature films, but the differences between the two media usually require dropping sections of the source text from the movie script. Here we study this screen adaptation process by constructing narrative alignments using the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm coupled with SBERT embedding distance to quantify text similarity between scenes and book units. We use these alignments to perform an automated analysis of 40 adaptations, revealing insights into the screenwriting process concerning (i) faithfulness of adaptation, (ii) importance of dialog, (iii) preservation of narrative order, and (iv) gender representation issues reflective of the Bechdel test.

Submission Number: 801