期刊名称:Conference on European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)
出版年度:2012
卷号:2012
出版社:ACL Anthology
摘要:Understanding the ways in which information
achieves widespread public awareness is a research
question of significant interest. We
consider whether, and how, the way in which
the information is phrased ¡ª the choice of
words and sentence structure¡ªcan affect this
process. To this end, we develop an analysis
framework and build a corpus of movie
quotes, annotated with memorability information,
in which we are able to control for both
the speaker and the setting of the quotes. We
find that there are significant differences between
memorable and non-memorable quotes
in several key dimensions, even after controlling
for situational and contextual factors. One
is lexical distinctiveness: in aggregate, memorable
quotes use less common word choices,
but at the same time are built upon a scaffolding
of common syntactic patterns. Another
is that memorable quotes tend to be more
general in ways that make them easy to apply
in new contexts ¡ª that is, more portable.
We also show how the concept of ¡°memorable
language¡± can be extended across domains.