The Big Bang Theory Transcript Corpus

We used fan-sourced transcripts for The Big Bang Theory as data set for our experiment. The Blog site had transcripts for the 9 season ( 220 scenes ) of The Big Bang Theory, categorized by season and episode. One of the first task was to extract transcripts from these webpages.

We manually constructed a list of links of all URL's. Using this list content was scraped from the web and only relevant text was extracted and dumped into text format under corpus/raw_corpus directory.

You can run util.py to reproduce this corpus. By default it uses the file episode_links.json for list the links.

python util.py episode_links.json 

Requires lxml and requests python module

You can run preprocessing.py to perform preprocessing on the data.This script requires corpus.json

python preprocessing.py

The previous step of util.py creates a corpus.json which is JSON representation of season /episode categorized transcript

A single episode transcript is of the form

[Scene]
SpeakerA : ***Some Text***
SpeakerB : ***Some Text***
SpeakerC : ***Some Text***
...
...
...
[Scene]
SpeakerA : ***Some Text***
SpeakerB : ***Some Text***
SpeakerC : ***Some Text***
...
...
...

• We treat every Scene as distinct unit to be processed. Theoretically, a scene change occurs even when new characters enter or exit. However, for our corpus, there were only 13 turns that had enters and 18 that had exits of the total 1028000 turns and hence we decided ignore splitting the scene when a character enters or exits.

  There were instances when they made sense for e.g

  Penny (as Sheldon enters): Shh! Act normal.

  While instances when they had no relevance for e.g.

  Leonard (entering on the phone): I’m really very busy. Is there any way that we can put this off

• Another challenge were instances where extra attributes being mentioned along with speaker information. This extra information needed to removed to capture the speaker name. We could have used Named Entity Recognition for this, but we used the naive approach to parse for brackets and ignore any content within the brackets.This has worked fine for us.

  for e.g.

  Speaker: Penny( Sitting quitely):

  resulted in capturing speaker as Penny

• As not all speakers had enough dialogues, to identify the character, we needed to define the subset of characters to be considered as classification label. We wrote additional script to analyze the # of dialogues by each character. We chose a threshold of 4 to decide the main classification labels. We included an extra label for all other characters clubbed together as "Others". Hence each dialogue can be classified to be spoken by one of the five characters in our case ["Leonard","Sheldon","Penny", "Howard","Others"]

  Character	Dialogues
  Sheldon	164415
  Leonard	94143
  Penny	73147
  Howard	62951
  Raj	50924
  Amy	32641

For each scene we capture

• Scene Description
• Season_Episode
• List of Turns (Turn Object)
• List of Participants ( Names of Characters present in the turn)

For each turn (Turn Object) we capture

• Speaker
• Recipients
• List of words(after removing stop words) in the turn (utterance)
• POS tag for each word
• Topic associated with the turn (Topic extracted using LDA model)
• ACT Tag

We save list of scenes per episode in a JSON format, where each episode in a season has a key of season_episode. Additionally, it also generated a JSON file for the unique words over the entire corpus with key as the lemmatized word and value as occurence frequency.This can be useful for topic extraction.

We use nltk toolkit to remove stop words and

Please see corpus reader tool, train and classify methods & evaluation methods for more information on the next steps