Automatic creation of a 3D cartoon from natural language story

Abstract

The automatic creation of 3D animation from natural language text is used in many fields. The main target of this paper is to produce a 3D cartoon from a text input. Therefore, we need to analyze the input corpus to extract useful information by employing theories and tools from linguistics and natural language processing in addition to computer graphics for human language visualization. The system operates through two phases. The NLP phase, in which input text passes first through a coreference resolution solver in order to remove pronouns and substitute them with their corresponding nouns followed by a dependency parser in order to detect subject-action-object (SAO) relations in the resolved text. The sequence of SAOs resulting from the NLP phase is passed to the graphics phase. In the graphics phase a 3D animated video cartoon is generated by visualizing each SAO extracted in the NLP phase and Storytelling using the Unity game engine platform. The main contribution of this work is that the input does not have to be a screenplay. It is also demonstrated that performing coreference resolution before dependency parsing resulted in a more compact sequence of SAOs.

Keywords

• Computer graphics
• Natural language processing
• 3D cartoon
• Story visualization