May 7, 2012

'You're gonna need a bigger quote!': What makes movie lines memorable

Whether it's a line from a movie, an advertising slogan or a politician's catchphrase, some statements take hold in people's minds better than others. By applying computer analysis to a database of movie scripts, Cornell researchers have found some clues to what makes a line memorable.

The study suggests that memorable lines use familiar sentence structure but incorporate distinctive words or phrases, and they make general statements that could apply elsewhere. The latter may explain why lines like "You're gonna need a bigger boat" or "These aren't the droids you're looking for" (accompanied by a hand gesture) have become standing jokes. You can use them in a different context and apply the line to your own situation.


"Using movie scripts allowed us to study just the language, without other factors. We needed a way of asking a question just about the language, and the movies make a very nice dataset," explained graduate student Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, first author of a paper to be presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics July 8-14 in Jeju, South Korea.

The study grows out of ongoing work on how ideas travel across networks. "We've been looking at things like who talks to whom," said Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, "but we hadn't explored how the language in which an idea was presented might have an effect."

To address that, he collaborated with Lillian Lee, professor of computer science, who specializes in computer processing of natural human language, along with Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Justin Cheng '12.


They asked a group of people who had not seen the movies to choose which quote in the pairs was most memorable. Two rules of thumb emerged to identify the memorable choice: distinctiveness and generality.




