Title
You had me at hello: how phrasing affects memorability
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 scaf-folding 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.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2012
ACL '12 Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Long Papers - Volume 1
contextual factor,memorable language,analysis framework,common syntactic pattern,key dimension,significant interest,memorability information,common word choice,significant difference,memorable quote
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Conference
abs/1203.6360
39
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.69
14
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil193548.42
Justin Cheng279934.10
Jon Kleinberg3227072358.90
Lillian Lee47572754.70