Stories can have tremendous power -- not only useful for entertainment, they
can activate our interests and mobilize our actions. The degree to which a
story resonates with its audience may be in part reflected in the emotional
journey it takes the audience upon. In this paper, we use machine learning
methods to construct emotional arcs in movies, calculate families of arcs, and
demonstrate the ability for certain arcs to predict audience engagement. The
system is applied to Hollywood films and high quality shorts found on the web.
We begin by using deep convolutional neural networks for audio and visual
sentiment analysis. These models are trained on both new and existing
large-scale datasets, after which they can be used to compute separate audio
and visual emotional arcs. We then crowdsource annotations for 30-second video
clips extracted from highs and lows in the arcs in order to assess the
micro-level precision of the system, with precision measured in terms of
agreement in polarity between the system's predictions and annotators' ratings.
These annotations are also used to combine the audio and visual predictions.
Next, we look at macro-level characterizations of movies by investigating
whether there exist `universal shapes' of emotional arcs. In particular, we
develop a clustering approach to discover distinct classes of emotional arcs.
Finally, we show on a sample corpus of short web videos that certain emotional
arcs are statistically significant predictors of the number of comments a video
receives. These results suggest that the emotional arcs learned by our approach
successfully represent macroscopic aspects of a video story that drive audience
engagement. Such machine understanding could be used to predict audience
reactions to video stories, ultimately improving our ability as storytellers to
communicate with each other.

利用机器学习方法构建电影中的情感弧线，计算弧线系列，并展示了某些弧线预测观众参与度的能力。通过调查观众的反应，结果表明学习到的弧线成功地表示了影片故事的宏观方面，这进一步提高了我们作为讲故事人之间交流能力，以预测观众对视频故事的反应。