NBA_Streaming: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Fine-Grained Basketball Commentary Generation in Continuous Streams

Abstract

Live basketball commentary generation requires determining when an event is sufficiently observable and describing it before subsequent events unfold. However, existing methods are primarily designed for pre-segmented clips or complete videos, making them unsuitable for continuous streams. Existing datasets also provide limited supervision for player identities, fine-grained actions, event attributes, and coherent event chains, restricting the factual richness of generated commentary. To address these limitations, we introduce NBA_Streaming, a large-scale benchmark for online fine-grained basketball commentary generation. It contains 307.5 hours of basketball broadcasts and approximately 35K temporally aligned events, with annotations of event boundaries, player identities, fine-grained actions, event chains, and natural-language commentary. By moving from isolated clips to continuous streams, NBA_Streaming enables unified evaluation of event localization, response reliability, factual grounding, and commentary quality under causal constraints. We further propose a causal two-stage framework that combines completion-first localization with ball-centric semantic grounding, enabling the system to identify complete events from observed streams and organize scene, event, identity, and action cues for commentary generation. Extensive experiments reveal the difficulty of NBA_Streaming, where existing baselines struggle with online timing, factual grounding, and fine-grained description. Our framework consistently improves over strong alternatives, while the remaining gap highlights NBA_Streaming as a valuable benchmark for streaming sports video understanding and generation. The code and data will be made publicly available upon acceptance.