Once More, With Feeling: Measuring Emotion of Acting Performances in Contemporary American Film
This addresses the problem of understanding emotion in film acting for researchers in computational media and film studies, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the computational analysis of acting performances in contemporary American film by applying speech emotion recognition models and a sociolinguistic framework, finding patterns in narrative structure, diachronic shifts, and genre-based constraints in spoken performances.
Narrative film is a composition of writing, cinematography, editing, and performance. While much computational work has focused on the writing or visual style in film, we conduct in this paper a computational exploration of acting performance. Applying speech emotion recognition models and a variationist sociolinguistic analytical framework to a corpus of popular, contemporary American film, we find narrative structure, diachronic shifts, and genre- and dialogue-based constraints located in spoken performances.