An Interpretable Linguistically-Grounded Analysis of Scene Saliency in Movie Screenplays
Uday Bindal, Ishaan Karan, Manan Garg, Ekansh Goyal, Rahul Mishra, Rajakrishnan Rajkumar
Abstract
We investigate the factors affecting salience in movie screenplay by posing two research questions: 1. {\em Does Uniform Information Density (UID) predict salient scenes?} 2. {\em What other linguistic properties distinguish salient scenes from non-salient background?} We answer both questions through a controlled corpus study on the MENSA corpus, paired with a Linguistically-Grounded Salience Model (LGSM), a dual-stream classifier that fuses a frozen BERT encoder with explicit linguistic features through adaptive gating. The UID picture is layered in long-form discourse. Per-scene UID summaries carry no independent signal once length is controlled, but at the token level salient scenes match non-salient material in the bulk while specifically suppressing the rarest, hardest-to-predict tokens in the upper tail. UID therefore lives at the within-scene token level rather than as a per-scene aggregate. Salient scenes also show a moderate and sustained cast of central characters (following an inverted-U pattern), strong third-person usage, syntactically simpler language, and more abstract vocabulary about motivation and conflict. LGSM exploits this signature and improves recall on salient scenes over a strong semantic baseline while yielding better downstream summaries.