Synopses of Movie Narratives: a Video-Language Dataset for Story Understanding
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Abstract (arXiv)
Despite recent advances of AI, story understanding remains an open and under-investigated problem. We collect, preprocess, and publicly release a video-language story dataset, Synopses of Movie Narratives (SyMoN), containing 5,193 video summaries of popular movies and TV series with a total length of 869 hours. SyMoN captures naturalistic storytelling videos made by human creators and intended for a human audience. As a prototypical and naturalistic story dataset, SyMoN features high coverage of multimodal story events and abundant mental-state descriptions. Its use of storytelling techniques cause cross-domain semantic gaps that provide appropriate challenges to existing models. We establish benchmarks on video-text retrieval and zero-shot alignment on movie summary videos, which showcase the importance of in-domain data and long-term memory in story understanding. With SyMoN, we hope to lay the groundwork for progress in multimodal story understanding.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 61 of its 141 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2022.
Builds on
61 of 141 references.
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50 most cited of 61 All 61 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 3; 2024: 2; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.
8 papers.
- 2023AutoAD: Movie Description in Contextcited by 50
- 2023Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understandingcited by 11
- 2024Movie101v2: Improved Movie Narration Benchmarkcited by 9
- 2022TeViS:Translating Text Synopses to Video Storyboardscited by 5
- 2023PTVD: A Large-Scale Plot-Oriented Multimodal Dataset Based on Television Dramascited by 4
- 2024Multilingual Synopses of Movie Narratives: A Dataset for Vision-Language Story Understandingcited by 2
- 2025Two Causally Related Needles in a Video Haystackcited by 1
- 2026REFRAMED: Towards Realistic Audio Description Generation for Moviescited by 1
- 2026REFRAMED: Towards Realistic Audio Description Generation for Movies10 Aug 2026
- 2025Two Causally Related Needles in a Video Haystack26 May 2025
- 2024Multilingual Synopses of Movie Narratives: A Dataset for Vision-Language Story Understanding18 Jun 2024
- 2024Movie101v2: Improved Movie Narration Benchmark20 Apr 2024
- 2023Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding16 Nov 2023
- 2023PTVD: A Large-Scale Plot-Oriented Multimodal Dataset Based on Television Dramas26 Jun 2023
- 2023AutoAD: Movie Description in Context29 Mar 2023
- 2022TeViS:Translating Text Synopses to Video Storyboards31 Dec 2022