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ACL
2012

You Had Me at Hello: How Phrasing Affects Memorability

12 years 15 days ago
You Had Me at Hello: How Phrasing Affects Memorability
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 — the choice of words and sentence structure — can 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 — that is, more portable. We also show how th...
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jo
Added 29 Sep 2012
Updated 29 Sep 2012
Type Journal
Year 2012
Where ACL
Authors Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon M. Kleinberg, Lillian Lee
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