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Genre analysis of movies using a topic model of plot summaries

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  • Paul Matthews
  • Kathrina Glitre

Abstract

Genre plays an important role in the description, navigation, and discovery of movies, but it is rarely studied at large scale using quantitative methods. This allows an analysis of how genre labels are applied, how genres are composed and how these ingredients change, and how genres compare. We apply unsupervised topic modeling to a large collection of textual movie summaries and then use the model's topic proportions to investigate key questions in genre, including recognizability, mapping, canonicity, and change over time. We find that many genres can be quite easily predicted by their lexical signatures and this defines their position on the genre landscape. We find significant genre composition changes between periods for westerns, science fiction and road movies, reflecting changes in production and consumption values. We show that in terms of canonicity, canonical examples are often at the high end of the topic distribution profile for the genre rather than central as might be predicted by categorization theory.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Matthews & Kathrina Glitre, 2021. "Genre analysis of movies using a topic model of plot summaries," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(12), pages 1511-1527, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:72:y:2021:i:12:p:1511-1527
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.24525
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Margaret Roberts & Brandon Stewart & Tingley, Dustin & Edoardo Airoldi, 2013. "The structural topic model and applied social science," Working Paper 132666, Harvard University OpenScholar.
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