Gender-Distinguishing Features in Film Dialogue
Alexandra Schofield, Leo Mehr · 2016
Film scripts provide a means of examining generalized western social perceptions of accepted human behavior.In particular, we focus on how dialogue in films describes gender, identifying linguistic and structural differences in speech for men and women and in same and different-gendered pairs.Using the Cornell Movie-Dialogs Corpus (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al., 2012a), we identify significant linguistic and structural features of dialogue that differentiate genders in conversation and analyze how those effects relate to existing literature on gender in film.Author's Note (July 2020) The subsequent work below makes gender determinations based on a binary assignment assessed using statistics from most common baby names.We regret and recommend against this heuristic for several reasons: