Catchphrase: Automatic Detection of Cultural References
This work addresses the challenge of identifying cultural references for social media users and researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing concepts like snowclones.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically detecting cultural references in text, specifically snowclones from pop-culture quotes, by introducing a new dataset and training models, resulting in a browser plugin called Catchphrase that was evaluated via a user study.
A snowclone is a customizable phrasal template that can be realized in multiple, instantly recognized variants. For example, ``* is the new *" (Orange is the new black, 40 is the new 30). Snowclones are extensively used in social media. In this paper, we study snowclones originating from pop-culture quotes; our goal is to automatically detect cultural references in text. We introduce a new, publicly available data set of pop-culture quotes and their corresponding snowclone usages and train models on them. We publish code for Catchphrase, an internet browser plugin to automatically detect and mark references in real-time, and examine its performance via a user study. Aside from assisting people to better comprehend cultural references, we hope that detecting snowclones can complement work on paraphrasing and help to tackle long-standing questions in social science about the dynamics of information propagation.