Abstract
Accurate prediction of television (TV) audience ratings is a crucial technology for advertisers and broadcast-ers, which influences advertising costs and indicates program popularity. As for Japanese TV dramas, previous studies have examined factors available prior to broadcast, such as cast com-position, metadata variables (e.g., scheduled time slot, broadcasting station, episode duration), and indicators of actor popularity. However, such studies have been limited in their evaluation of contextual information related to these factors and have not considered additional modalities such as text data. Here, we propose the use of knowledge-based embeddings derived from Japanese Wikipedia to improve audience ratings prediction. The proposed bag-of-entities method is applied to represent dramas in terms of cast, production team, and plot synopsis elements, and is evaluated against conventional metadata features. In an ablation study, supervised forecasting models using Support Vector Machine (SVM) are trained on combinations of the feature groups. These are devised and tested on viewership data collected from the Audience Rating TV (ARTV) database for 574 Japanese TV dramas aired between 2003 and 2021. Our experimental results indicate that a SVM model conditioned on the full feature set outperforms baseline methods, achieving a 77.4 % F1-score. After stratifying predictions based on time slot popularity, the approach is found to be effective for predicting audience ratings in challenging, high-popularity time slots, with improvements in recognition rate up to 19.1 %.