Narrative Plot Comparison Based on a Bag-of-actors Document Model

Comparing documents based on their semantic plot structure or narrative is an important problem in several application areas. Approaches based on information retrieval methods, latent semantic indexing, sentence embedding, and topic modeling are inadequate to capture the structural elements of the narrative. In this work, we present an abstract "bag-of-actors" document model, meant for comparing, indexing and retrieving documents based on their narrative structures. This model is based on resolving the main entities or actors in the plot, and the corresponding actions associated with them. We use this to compare movie plot summaries from IMDB (Internet Movie Database) to identify movie plots that are remakes or were inspired by one another. Evaluation over a wide range of movie plots from different genres, show encouraging results.