Estimation of character diagram from open-movie databases for cultural understanding

Abstract

In many movies, cultures, social conditions, and awareness of the issues of the times are depicted in any form. Even if fantasy and SF are works far from reality, the stories do mirror the real world. Therefore, we assumed to be able to understand social conditions and cultures of the real world by analyzing the movie. As a way to analyze the film, we decided to estimate the interpersonal relationships between the characters in the movies. In this paper, we propose a method of estimating interpersonal relationships of the characters using Markov Logic Network from movie script databases on the Web. Markov Logic Network is a probabilistic logic network that can describe the relationships between characters, which are not necessarily satisfied on every occasion. In experiments, we confirmed that our proposed method can estimate favors between the characters in a movie with a precision of 64.2%. Finally, by comparing the estimated relationships with social indicators, we discussed the relevance of the movie to the real world.