Stage Direction Classification in French Theater: Transfer Learning Experiments

Résumé En

The automatic classification of stage directions is a little explored topic in computational drama analysis (CDA), in spite of their relevance for plays’ structural and stylistic analysis. We developed a 13-class stage direction typology, based on annotations in the FreDraCor corpus (French-language plays), but abstracting away from their huge variability while still pro viding classes useful for literary research. We fine-tuned transformers-based models to classify against the typology, gradually decreasing training-corpus size to compare model efficiency with reduced training data. A result comparison speaks in favour of distilled monolingual models for this task, and, unlike earlier research on German, shows no negative effects of model case-sensitivity. The results have practical relevance for computational literary studies, as comparing classification results with complementary stage direction typologies, limiting the amount of manual annotation needed to apply them, would be helpful towards a systematic study of this important textual element.