From my pen to your ears: automatic production of radio plays from unstructured story text

Abstract

A radio play is a form of drama which exists in the acoustic domain and is usually consumed over broadcast radio. In this paper a method is proposed that, given a story in the form of unstructured text, produces a radio play that tells this story. First, information about characters, acting lines, and environments is retrieved from the text. The information extracted serves to generate a production script which can be used either by producers of radiodrama, or subsequently used to automatically generate the radio play as an audio file. The system is evaluated in two parts: precision, recall, and f1 scores are computed for the information retrieval part while multistimulus listening tests are used for subjective evaluation of the generated audio.