Stage Direction Classification in French Theater: Transfer Learning Experiments

Alexia Schneider, Pablo Ruiz Fabo


Abstract
The automatic classification of stage directions is a little explored topic in computational drama analysis, in spite of their relevance for plays’ structural and stylistic analysis. With a view to start assessing good practices for the automatic annotation of this textual element, we developed a 13-class stage direction typology, based on annotations in the FreDraCor corpus (French-language plays), but abstracting away from their huge variability while still providing classes useful for literary research. We fine-tuned transformers-based models to classify against the typology, gradually decreasing the corpus size used for fine tuning, to compare model efficiency with reduced training data. A result comparison speaks in favour of distilled monolingual models for this task, and, unlike earlier research on German, shows no negative effects of model case-sensitivity. The results have practical relevance for computational literary studies, as comparing classification results with complementary stage direction typologies, limiting the amount of manual annotation needed to apply them, would be helpful towards a systematic study of this important textual element.
Anthology ID:
2024.latechclfl-1.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2024)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julians, Malta
Editors:
Yuri Bizzoni, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Stan Szpakowicz
Venues:
LaTeCHCLfL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
278–286
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.latechclfl-1.28
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexia Schneider and Pablo Ruiz Fabo. 2024. Stage Direction Classification in French Theater: Transfer Learning Experiments. In Proceedings of the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2024), pages 278–286, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stage Direction Classification in French Theater: Transfer Learning Experiments (Schneider & Ruiz Fabo, LaTeCHCLfL-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.latechclfl-1.28.pdf
Supplementary material:
 2024.latechclfl-1.28.SupplementaryMaterial.zip
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 https://aclanthology.org/2024.latechclfl-1.28.mp4