Connotation Frames of Power and Agency in Modern Films

Maarten Sap, Marcella Cindy Prasettio, Ari Holtzman, Hannah Rashkin, Yejin Choi


Abstract
The framing of an action influences how we perceive its actor. We introduce connotation frames of power and agency, a pragmatic formalism organized using frame semantic representations, to model how different levels of power and agency are implicitly projected on actors through their actions. We use the new power and agency frames to measure the subtle, but prevalent, gender bias in the portrayal of modern film characters and provide insights that deviate from the well-known Bechdel test. Our contributions include an extended lexicon of connotation frames along with a web interface that provides a comprehensive analysis through the lens of connotation frames.
Anthology ID:
D17-1247
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2329–2334
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1247
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1247
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maarten Sap, Marcella Cindy Prasettio, Ari Holtzman, Hannah Rashkin, and Yejin Choi. 2017. Connotation Frames of Power and Agency in Modern Films. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2329–2334, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Connotation Frames of Power and Agency in Modern Films (Sap et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1247.pdf
Attachment:
 D17-1247.Attachment.zip