Joke-o-mat HD is a system that allows a user to navigate sitcoms (such as Seinfeld) by "narrative themes", including scenes, punchlines, and dialog segments. The themes can be filtered by the main actors and by keyword. For example, the user can select to see only punchlines by Kramer that contain the word "armoire". The system infers the narrative themes using segmentation of the audio track into laughter, actors, words, and music. The segmentation can be generated either by an expert annotator, via automatic methods, or by exploiting human derived (HD) "found" data such as fan-generated scripts and closed captions. We demonstrate browsing one episode of Seinfeld using all three methods of generating segmentations. Categories and Subject Descriptors H5.5 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Sound and Music Computing--Signal analysis, synthesis, and processing; H5.4 [Information Systems Applications]: Navigation General Terms semantic segmentation K...
Adam Janin, Luke R. Gottlieb, Gerald Friedland