  For over a decade, TV series have been drawing increasing interest, both from
the audience and from various academic fields. But while most viewers are
hooked on the continuous plots of TV serials, the few annotated datasets
available to researchers focus on standalone episodes of classical TV series.
We aim at filling this gap by providing the multimedia/speech processing
communities with Serial Speakers, an annotated dataset of 161 episodes from
three popular American TV serials: Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and House of
Cards. Serial Speakers is suitable both for investigating multimedia retrieval
in realistic use case scenarios, and for addressing lower level speech related
tasks in especially challenging conditions. We publicly release annotations for
every speech turn (boundaries, speaker) and scene boundary, along with
annotations for shot boundaries, recurring shots, and interacting speakers in a
subset of episodes. Because of copyright restrictions, the textual content of
the speech turns is encrypted in the public version of the dataset, but we
provide the users with a simple online tool to recover the plain text from
their own subtitle files.
