Papers › MovieSum: An Abstractive Summarization Dataset for Movie Screenplays

MovieSum: An Abstractive Summarization Dataset for Movie Screenplays

12 Aug 2024arXiv:2408.06281archive 2025-07-28

Rohit Saxena, Frank Keller

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.

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Abstractive Text SummarizationDocument SummarizationLong-Form Narrative Summarization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Long-Form Narrative Summarization MovieSum Description Only (LED) BERTScore (F1) 58.92 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Long-Form Narrative Summarization MovieSum Two-Stage Heuristic (LED Large) BERTScore (F1) 58.54 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

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