Movie Synopsis Research Articles

Automatic assignment of moral foundations to movies by word embedding

Morality is a topic that people are increasingly concerned about. Morality is observed and measured during public acts or when developing and consuming products, such as movies. The Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) was developed to rigorously perform these measurements with the support of the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD). In this paper, a Word Embedding-based Moral Foundation Assignment (WEMFA) approach has been designed, implemented, and applied to the movie domain for multiple assignment of moral foundations. WEMFA may use any dictionary, and it has been applied to a movie collection generated from movie synopses. A comparison between WEMFA and MoralStrength, the only approach found in the scientific literature, has been carried out. The proposed approach provided a percentage improvement of 41.7% with respect to the best version of MoralStrength, which uses an extension of the original MFD almost 10 times larger in number of terms. In addition, an extension of the original MFD (MFD24) has been built by adding 14 new moral foundations to the 10 original ones, enriching the moral context. WEMFA provided a mean accuracy of 78% with MFD24 despite the increment of the number of moral foundations. Besides, new extended dictionaries or even totally different ones can be used with WEMFA, since it does not need any training.

The Effect of Movie Synopsis on Students’ Vocabulary Mastery of the First Grade Students at MTsN 2 Bengkulu

This research aims to know the effect of using movie synopsis on students' vocabulary mastery in the first-grade students of MTsN 2 Kota Bengkulu. The population of this research is seven classes of the first-grade students of MTsN 2 Kota Bengkulu; the total number is 301 students. The sample was taken by class VIIB, an experimental class with 30 students, and class VIIA, a control class with 30 students. The instrument of the research used a vocabulary test. The data was evaluated and analyzed to determine the effect using the T-test Formula. The result means that there are differences between both classes in the effect of movies synopsis on students' vocabulary mastery. In other words, the experimental class's vocabulary increased more than the control class. The mean score of the pre-test result of the experimental class was 58,56, the mean score of the control class was 59,86, the mean score of the post-test result of the experimental class was 76,63, and the control class was 61,90. The gain of pre-test and post-test of the experimental class was 18.07, and the gain of pre-test and post-test of the control class was 2.04. It means movies' synopsis as education media was influential in developing students' vocabulary mastery. The researchers suggest that teachers use the synopsis of the movie as one of the techniques in teaching vocabulary, so the teacher can motivate the students to develop their vocabulary mastery and contribute to developing the teaching and learning English process, especially in teaching English vocabulary.

Winning box office with the right movie synopsis

PurposeConsumers often search for movie information and purchase tickets on the go. A synopsis is often provided by producers and theatres in mobile apps and websites. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, little research has investigated whether the synopsis has an impact on a movie’s box office. This research uses computerized text analysis in examining the influence of linguistic cues of a synopsis on the movie’s financial performance. This paper aims to show that language choice in a synopsis is a significant factor in predicting box office performance.Design/methodology/approachA total usable sample of 5973 movies was collected using a web crawler. Computerised text analysis using linguistic inquiry and word count was adopted to analyse the movie synopses data. The empirical study comprises two phases. Phase 1 used exploratory factor analysis on 50 per cent of the sample (Sample 1) to establish the dimensionality of psychological processes as reflected in the linguistic expressions. The analysis identified 11 linguistic variables that loaded on four dimensions. The factor structure was replicated on an independent sample (Sample 2) using confirmatory factor analysis. Phase 2 tested the hypotheses using structure equation modelling.FindingsResults show that consistency between movie genres and linguistic cues in a film synopsis promotes movie box office revenue when linguistic cues shown in the synopsis confirm a consumer’s expectancies about a focal movie genre. Conversely, a synopsis reduces the movie box office revenue when the linguistic cues shown disconfirm the genre-based expectancies. These linguistic cues exert similar effects on action and crime films but different effects on comedies and drama films.Research limitations/implicationsIt is likely that consumer tastes and linguistic styles of film synopses have evolved over time. As a cross-sectional study, such changes were not taken into consideration in the current research. A longitudinal study in the future can reveal the dynamic relationship between film synopses and audience.Practical implicationsManagerially, the findings show that a synopsis is an effective communication touch point to position a movie. This research provides concrete guidelines in crafting synopses with the “rights words’ aligned with movie-goers’ expectations within each specific genre. Beyond movie consumption, the research findings can be applied to other entertainment products, such as TV series and books.Originality/valueTo our knowledge, this research is the first in studying the linguistic cues in synopses and its relation to box office performance. It addresses this knowledge gap by answering the basic question of whether movie synopses matter. Methodically, the paper marks the first attempt to use the two-step structural equation modelling method on computerised content analysis data.

“To Tia with love”: Chilean mathematics teacher identities after professional development

It is not easy for teachers to re-author their professional identities to incorporate change after participation in professional development (PD). In this article, we seek to understand Chilean teachers’ collective identity performances after PD into collaborative problem-solving mathematics. We undertook a classical thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews held with 10 primary school teachers 18 months after their participation in PD. We present an innovative report of our findings by combining the interview analysis into a movie synopsis and creating a fictional protagonist, Tia (‘aunty’ in Spanish), who represents the common findings from the ten teachers. We found the attractive identities performed by teachers, in particular the ‘mother-saviour’ and the ‘successful’ teacher, conflicted with their understandings of the teacher role promoted by PD. We argue the unique method of combining data allowed for reporting findings with both breadth and depth and this enabled us to see the way in which identities are culturally and contextually produced. We suggest PD needs to cater to these attractive teacher identities in order to be successful and sustainable in the long term.

A Triple Wing Harmonium Model for Movie Recommendation

A new triple wing harmonium (TWH) model that integrates text metadata into a low-dimensional semantic space is proposed for the application of content-based movie recommendation. The text metadata considered here include movie synopsis, actor list, and user comments. We develop a new TWH model projecting these multiple textual features into low-dimensional latent topics with different probability distribution assumptions. A contrastive divergence (CD) algorithm is used for efficient learning and inference. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art algorithms for movie recommendation.