@inproceedings{ruth-etal-2026-listening,
title = "Listening for Ideology: Automatic Analysis of Character Speech in Historical Nazi Propaganda Films",
author = "Ruth, Nicolas and
Burghardt, Manuel and
Niekler, Andreas",
editor = "Piperidis, Stelios and
Bel, N{\'u}ria and
van den Heuvel, Henk and
Ide, Nancy and
Krek, Simon and
Toral, Antonio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
month = may,
year = "2026",
address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.461/",
doi = "10.63317/4fxfeqysxtnz",
pages = "5828--5838",
abstract = "While the visual dimension of film has been widely explored in digital humanities through methods such as ``distant viewing'', the audio layer has received less attention despite its crucial role in meaning-making. We address this gap with a four-step pipeline combining speaker diarization, audio gender classification, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and LLM-based psycholinguistic analysis to infer character traits from film dialogues. Applying this method to a set of Nazi propaganda films, we find that despite challenges in speaker diarization due to noisy historical film audio, modern ASR and GPT-based analyses produce character profiles consistent with existing filmic research. Our proposed pipeline advances distant reading of film dialogue, complementing visual analyses and enabling scalable study of ideology in historical cinema. A case study of female characters in NS films identifies three recurring types, centered on the ideological figure of the mother in National Socialism."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Listening for Ideology: Automatic Analysis of Character Speech in Historical Nazi Propaganda Films
%A Ruth, Nicolas
%A Burghardt, Manuel
%A Niekler, Andreas
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F ruth-etal-2026-listening
%X While the visual dimension of film has been widely explored in digital humanities through methods such as “distant viewing”, the audio layer has received less attention despite its crucial role in meaning-making. We address this gap with a four-step pipeline combining speaker diarization, audio gender classification, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and LLM-based psycholinguistic analysis to infer character traits from film dialogues. Applying this method to a set of Nazi propaganda films, we find that despite challenges in speaker diarization due to noisy historical film audio, modern ASR and GPT-based analyses produce character profiles consistent with existing filmic research. Our proposed pipeline advances distant reading of film dialogue, complementing visual analyses and enabling scalable study of ideology in historical cinema. A case study of female characters in NS films identifies three recurring types, centered on the ideological figure of the mother in National Socialism.
%R 10.63317/4fxfeqysxtnz
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.461/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/4fxfeqysxtnz
%P 5828-5838
Markdown (Informal)
[Listening for Ideology: Automatic Analysis of Character Speech in Historical Nazi Propaganda Films](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.461/) (Ruth et al., LREC 2026)
ACL