Combining Text and Images for Film Age Appropriateness Classification

We combine textual information from a corpus of film scripts and the images of important scenes from IMDB that correspond to these films to create a bimodal dataset (the dataset and scripts can be obtained from http://tinyurl.com/se9tlmr) for film age appropriateness classification with the objective of improving the prediction of age appropriateness for parents and children. We use state-of-the art Deep Learning image feature extraction, including DENSENet, ResNet, Inception, and NASNet. We have tested several Machine learning algorithms and have found xgboost to yield the best results. Previously reported classification accuracy, using only textual features, were 79.1% and 65.3% for American MPAA and British BBFC classification respectively. Using images alone, we achieve 64.8% and 56.7% classification accuracy. The most consistent combination of textual features and images' features achieves 81.1% and 66.8%, both statistically significant improvements over the use of text only. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.