MObyGaze: a film dataset of multimodal objectification densely annotated by experts
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
May 28, 2025
Abstract
Characterizing and quantifying gender representation disparities in
audiovisual storytelling contents is necessary to grasp how stereotypes may
perpetuate on screen. In this article, we consider the high-level construct of
objectification and introduce a new AI task to the ML community: characterize
and quantify complex multimodal (visual, speech, audio) temporal patterns
producing objectification in films. Building on film studies and psychology, we
define the construct of objectification in a structured thesaurus involving 5
sub-constructs manifesting through 11 concepts spanning 3 modalities. We
introduce the Multimodal Objectifying Gaze (MObyGaze) dataset, made of 20
movies annotated densely by experts for objectification levels and concepts
over freely delimited segments: it amounts to 6072 segments over 43 hours of
video with fine-grained localization and categorization. We formulate different
learning tasks, propose and investigate best ways to learn from the diversity
of labels among a low number of annotators, and benchmark recent vision, text
and audio models, showing the feasibility of the task. We make our code and our
dataset available to the community and described in the Croissant format:
https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MObyGaze-F600/.
