  Video understanding has long suffered from reliance on large labeled
datasets, motivating research into zero-shot learning. Recent progress in
language modeling presents opportunities to advance zero-shot video analysis,
but constructing an effective semantic space relating action classes remains
challenging. We address this by introducing a novel dataset, Stories, which
contains rich textual descriptions for diverse action classes extracted from
WikiHow articles. For each class, we extract multi-sentence narratives
detailing the necessary steps, scenes, objects, and verbs that characterize the
action. This contextual data enables modeling of nuanced relationships between
actions, paving the way for zero-shot transfer. We also propose an approach
that harnesses Stories to improve feature generation for training zero-shot
classification. Without any target dataset fine-tuning, our method achieves new
state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks, improving top-1 accuracy by up to
6.1%. We believe Stories provides a valuable resource that can catalyze
progress in zero-shot action recognition. The textual narratives forge
connections between seen and unseen classes, overcoming the bottleneck of
labeled data that has long impeded advancements in this exciting domain. The
data can be found here: https://github.com/kini5gowda/Stories .
