  Automatically generating animation from natural language text finds
application in a number of areas e.g. movie script writing, instructional
videos, and public safety. However, translating natural language text into
animation is a challenging task. Existing text-to-animation systems can handle
only very simple sentences, which limits their applications. In this paper, we
develop a text-to-animation system which is capable of handling complex
sentences. We achieve this by introducing a text simplification step into the
process. Building on an existing animation generation system for screenwriting,
we create a robust NLP pipeline to extract information from screenplays and map
them to the system's knowledge base. We develop a set of linguistic
transformation rules that simplify complex sentences. Information extracted
from the simplified sentences is used to generate a rough storyboard and video
depicting the text. Our sentence simplification module outperforms existing
systems in terms of BLEU and SARI metrics.We further evaluated our system via a
user study: 68 % participants believe that our system generates reasonable
animation from input screenplays.
