Connotation Frames of Power and Agency in Modern Films

Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2329–2334 Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7–11, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Connotation Frames of Power and Agency in Modern Films Maarten Sap Marcella Cindy Prasetio Ari Holtzman Hannah Rashkin Yejin Choi Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington, Seattle, USA {msap,mcp21,ahai,hrashkin,yejin}@cs.washington.edu Abstract The framing of an action influences how we perceive its actor. We introduce conno- tation frames of power and agency, a prag- matic formalism organized using frame se- mantic representations, to model how dif- ferent levels of power and agency are im- plicitly projected on actors through their actions. We use the new power and agency frames to measure the subtle, but prevalent, gender bias in the portrayal of modern film characters and provide in- sights that deviate from the well-known Bechdel test. Our contributions include an extended lexicon of connotation frames along with a web interface that provides a comprehensive analysis through the lens of connotation frames. 1 Introduction A viewer’s impression of a movie character is in- fluenced by how they are written and portrayed, which can in turn influence how people form stereotypes on gender norms (Behm-Morawitz and Mastro, 2008). A character’s actions can be projected with varying levels of power and agency, depending on the specific verbs used. For instance, somebody who “accepts” things is implied to be a passive decision-maker (or of lower agency) than somebody who “assesses” things. While not ex- plicitly stated, these connotative meanings pro- jected by different verbs can influence the assump- tions the audience makes about the people being described. These assumptions can have negative consequences if they reinforce negative stereo- types (Walton and Spencer, 2009). To formalize this implicit information about people projected by actions, we introduce power and agency connotation frames, two new types of The man with the roses beckons Irene forward. agency Another man steps in behind her, trapping her... She slices upwards with a razor-sharp knife... The move ends with Irene's finger over her own mouth... He obeys, eyes bulging. agency agency agency power + power + + power — power Figure 1: An excerpt from a box-office hit, Sher- lock Holmes (2009). Bolded words are the predi- cates, solid underlined phrases are the agent of the verb, and dash underlined words are the theme. The full example with additional nuanced discus- sion is available in Figure 6 in the appendix. predicate-specific connotative relationships as an extension to Rashkin et al. (2016)’s connotation frame lexicon. For instance, in Figure 1, the verb “beckoning” implies that its theme (Irene) has less power than its agent (the man). In the third line, Irene displays strong agency when she “slices” in self-defense. In contrast, when the man “obeys”, the man has low implied agency. Using the new connotation lexicon, we present a quantitative study to reveal the subtle, but preva- lent gender1 bias in modern films. Going beyond the surface level analysis such as screen time or number …

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