Scene reordering in movie script alignment

Screenplays are a very interesting source of information to describe and analyze a movie. Once aligned to the video timeline using time information extracted from the subtitles, they can be useful in many multimedia applications because they contain textual descriptions of scenes, names of the speaking characters, dialogues, etc. An alignment however is not always straightforward. The scripts freely available online often do not reflect the released version of the movie showing changes in dialogues, as well as scenes added, removed or reordered in post-production. In this paper we present two improvements to the algorithm traditionally used to align movie scripts with their videos. In particular we show that performance can be improved when taking into account the sequences that were reordered during the editing phase. We also present an automatic categorization of screenplays based on their similarity with the released movie.