You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg and Lillian Lee
Proceedings of ACL, 2012.
Data: Cornell Movie-Quotes Corpus (includes this readme)
Take our movie quotes memorability test [Beta just-for-fun version: your input will not affect any experiments.]
Factoids: memorable advertising slogans
blog post by Nicklas Noterar, giving an informal analysis of some of the American Film Institute's top 100 film quotes
We do other things besides look for droids. But that’s all anyone ever remembers.
[xkcd] If other star systems are listening in on our pop culture ...
Media coverage:
New Scientist: Software reveals what makes a catchy movie line
CBC’s The Afternoon Edition: Memorable Lines
MIT’s Technology Review blog: The Secret Science of Memorable Quotes
NPR’s All things considered: What Makes A Movie Quote Memorable?
The New York Times: Dickens, Austen and Twain, Through a Digital Lens
The Independent: Screen science: The secret of the lines we never forget
NBC’s The Today Show: Revealed: Why some movie quotes have us at 'hello'
Science News: Here’s looking at how the usual suspect film quotes go ahead and make your day
The Huffington Post: 'You Had Me At Hello' Study Reveals Secrets Of Memorable Movie Lines
The Economist’s Johnson blog: Hooray for Hollywood?
Washington Post’s Wonkblog: The science of memorable movie quotes
Boing Boing: Why certain phrases are memorable
BuzzFeed: The 6 steps to a perfect catchphrase
Cornell Chronicle: You're gonna need a bigger quote!
Wired.it: La formula per una frase indimenticabile
Österreichischer Rundfunk (Austrian national broadcaster): Der Stoff, aus dem Legenden sind
Scientas.nl: Filmcitaten: waarom onthouden wij ze?
O Globo: Frases inesquecíveis do cinema: cientistas descobrem o segredo
ABSTRACT:
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 the concept of "memorable language" can be extended across domains.
BibTeX ENTRY:
@InProceedings{Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil+al:12b,
author={Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Justin Cheng and Jon Kleinberg and
Lillian Lee},
title={You had me at hello: {How} phrasing affects memorability},
booktitle={Proceedings of ACL},
year={2012},
pages={892--901}
}