Linguistic analysis of differences in portrayal of movie characters

AbstractWe examine differences in portrayal of characters in movies using psycholinguistic and graph theoretic measures computed directly from screenplays. Differences are examined with respect to characters’ gender, race, age and other metadata. Psycholinguistic metrics are extrapolated to dialogues in movies using a linear regression model built on a set of manually annotated seed words. Interesting patterns are revealed about relationships between genders of production team and the gender ratio of characters. Several correlations are noted between gender, race, age of characters and the linguistic metrics.