What goes through screenwriters’ minds when they’re paging through a novel? Do they care more about the time limits of the film they want to make, or do they focus on capturing the content and the spirit of the story? What about dialogue, or narration? The relationship between a novel and its film adaptation has repeatedly been a subject of interest within the research community. As AI experts continue to analyze and help improve the screenwriting process, demand for generative applications like ChatGPT that can help automate creative tasks is on the rise.
Stony Brook University’s Ph.D. students Tanzir Pial, Shahreen Salim, Charuta Pethe, and Allen Kim, and the AI Institute's Director, Steven Skiena, used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to study the screen adaptation process and revealed several insights into screenwriters’ decision-making process, including faithfulness of adaptation, importance of dialogue, preservation of narrative order, as well as gender representation issues. This work was recently presented at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), one of the top conferences in the field.
Adapting a text alignment method used in the field of bioinformatics, the team was able to identify which portions of the book were excised in the adaptation, presenting novel insights into the screenwriting process. Their analysis revealed, among other findings, that longer books tend to have longer movie adaptations, and that longer movies tend to retain more of the plot of the sourcebook.
The team investigated 40 book-film adaptations, analyzing screenwriters’ decisions from several perspectives. Their findings reveal that parts of a book with dialogue are substantially more likely to be retained than narrative text and that the sequential order of events in books and scripts mostly coincide. It was also seen that the methods used by the team were better than current text alignment techniques, at both predicting the faithfulness of scripts to their source-books as well as deciding whether the film is likely to pass the Bechdel test.
Adaption of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two films (the green edges denote alignment with the correct portion of the book). Part I aligns with the front of the book, and Part II, the remainder.
The project’s lead researcher Tanzir Pial, said, “Our work demonstrates that alignment methods can be used to identify which parts of books appear in movies, and opens up new research directions regarding how films are adapted from books,” adding that the team’s future research will include exploring patterns in the screenwriting process that reflect the prevailing zeitgeist and cultural dynamics.
As an increasing number of companies are beginning to use generative applications for creative work and writers are becoming increasingly concerned about AI taking their jobs, a tool like this—which can both rewrite existing materials into different formats and identify its own limitations—has potential implications for both creators as well as technologists.
Communications Assistant
Ankita Nagpal