Linguistic analysis of differences in portrayal of movie characters

Anil Ramakrishna, Victor R. Martínez, Nikolaos Malandrakis, Karan Singla, Shrikanth Narayanan


Abstract
We examine differences in portrayal of characters in movies using psycholinguistic and graph theoretic measures computed directly from screenplays. Differences are examined with respect to characters’ gender, race, age and other metadata. Psycholinguistic metrics are extrapolated to dialogues in movies using a linear regression model built on a set of manually annotated seed words. Interesting patterns are revealed about relationships between genders of production team and the gender ratio of characters. Several correlations are noted between gender, race, age of characters and the linguistic metrics.
Anthology ID:
P17-1153
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1669–1678
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1153
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1153
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anil Ramakrishna, Victor R. Martínez, Nikolaos Malandrakis, Karan Singla, and Shrikanth Narayanan. 2017. Linguistic analysis of differences in portrayal of movie characters. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1669–1678, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Linguistic analysis of differences in portrayal of movie characters (Ramakrishna et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1153.pdf