A Framework for Classifying Movie Networks Using Graph Neural Networks

Abstract

Movie genre classification is a significant challenge in narrative analysis, as traditional methods often fail to capture complex structural relationships within movie stories. This study introduces the Intra-Cluster Weighted Movie Network (ICWMN), a novel framework designed to improve classification by using intra-movie relationships through Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). We constructed a large-scale dataset of 1631 movie character networks using an automated pipeline comprising web scraping, regular expressions, and fine-tuned BERT models for entity recognition. To address the computational limitations of fully connected models, we partition ICWMN into clusters and establish edges only between the k-most similar nodes using the K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm and various distance measures, such as the Laplacian and NetLSD. XGBoost is applied to optimize high-dimensional node feature vectors. Experimental results demonstrate outstanding performance, with the Graph Attention Network (GAT) emerging as the top-performing architecture, resulting in classification accuracies that peak at 95.00% on our 1631-movie dataset and an exceptional 97.30% on the 773-movie Moviegalaxies dataset. These findings confirm that prioritizing spectral properties and cluster-based network topologies significantly improve the precision and stability of genre classification compared to state-of-the-art methods.