6 ms·

> what verbs are used after “he” and “she”, and therefore what roles male and female characters tend to have within stories. It might've been better had the au

> what verbs are used after “he” and “she”, and therefore what roles male and female characters tend to have within stories. It might've been better had the author (and the Jane Austen article's author) used some NLP processing to see whether the pronoun was actually the subject of those verbs. But I'll grant that it's usually the case. Also interesting: gender and the object of those verbs. EDIT: after some research (that I should've done before posting), it's a remarkably effective technique and it seems only the most contorted sentences might get tripped up. English is nearly always Subject-Verb-Object.

burkaman 10y ago
Can you give an example sentence where this isn't the case?
dahart 10y ago
Do you need NLP for that? The forms he, she and they are used when a pronoun is the subject of a sentence. The forms him, her and them are used when a pronoun is the object of a sentence. https://www.englishgrammar.org/words-heshe-himher-hishers/ https://www.englishgrammar.org/words-heshe-himher-hishers/ I would think looking at the verb that comes after he/she also doubles as a subject/object filter.
- coroxout 10y ago
  I agree that the nominative case endings and usual SVO order of English should prevent (nearly all) false positives. (The only one I can think of is that comparatives are meant to take the nominative case, e.g. pedantically it's supposed to be "he" rather than "him" in "A man smarter than he would decline". However, this rather convoluted sentence structure is rare, even more unlikely in a plot summary rather than the full novel text, and almost always followed by the subjunctive rather than an indicative verb.) My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun, or has an adverb in the way. I thought major dramatic plot points might be more likely to use the character's name rather than a pronoun, and so we might see fewer words like "murders", "defeats", etc. From the results it seems like those words are still present in large quantities, so perhaps I'm wrong. I'd like to see it done with "they" too, partly as a control case and partly to see if any verbs are more common for individuals rather than groups (although the rise of impersonal "they" may hinder that aspect of the analysis).
  - wyldfire 10y ago
    > My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun, Yeah, some clever gender/name lookup would be a good idea, many subjects in plots are the characters' names. Maybe even more subject names than pronouns. That said, it seems unlikely that there's a pronoun-substitution gender bias, so it would probably just yield more samples of the same trend.
    - dahart 10y ago
      What doesn't get caught is a super interesting question. (As is object genders too.) How often he occurs vs she is important. How long he is talked about vs how long she is talked about; I'm not certain about screenplay conventions, but usually the first sentence would name the character and some number of subsequent sentences might use she rather than repeat her name. So yeah, there's plenty more room for making this analysis scientific, and no reason to assume it's unbiased.
jayd16 10y ago
One thing that might cause error is the difference in pronouns vs proper names names or other labels. In the example "The man winced, then he fell to the floor." You'd only register "he fell." This would also be biased if male or female characters were named more often.

burkaman 10y ago

Can you give an example sentence where this isn't the case?

dahart 10y ago

Do you need NLP for that? The forms he, she and they are used when a pronoun is the subject of a sentence. The forms him, her and them are used when a pronoun is the object of a sentence. https://www.englishgrammar.org/words-heshe-himher-hishers/ https://www.englishgrammar.org/words-heshe-himher-hishers/ I would think looking at the verb that comes after he/she also doubles as a subject/object filter.

coroxout 10y ago
I agree that the nominative case endings and usual SVO order of English should prevent (nearly all) false positives. (The only one I can think of is that comparatives are meant to take the nominative case, e.g. pedantically it's supposed to be "he" rather than "him" in "A man smarter than he would decline". However, this rather convoluted sentence structure is rare, even more unlikely in a plot summary rather than the full novel text, and almost always followed by the subjunctive rather than an indicative verb.) My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun, or has an adverb in the way. I thought major dramatic plot points might be more likely to use the character's name rather than a pronoun, and so we might see fewer words like "murders", "defeats", etc. From the results it seems like those words are still present in large quantities, so perhaps I'm wrong. I'd like to see it done with "they" too, partly as a control case and partly to see if any verbs are more common for individuals rather than groups (although the rise of impersonal "they" may hinder that aspect of the analysis).
- wyldfire 10y ago
  > My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun, Yeah, some clever gender/name lookup would be a good idea, many subjects in plots are the characters' names. Maybe even more subject names than pronouns. That said, it seems unlikely that there's a pronoun-substitution gender bias, so it would probably just yield more samples of the same trend.
  - dahart 10y ago
    What doesn't get caught is a super interesting question. (As is object genders too.) How often he occurs vs she is important. How long he is talked about vs how long she is talked about; I'm not certain about screenplay conventions, but usually the first sentence would name the character and some number of subsequent sentences might use she rather than repeat her name. So yeah, there's plenty more room for making this analysis scientific, and no reason to assume it's unbiased.

jayd16 10y ago

One thing that might cause error is the difference in pronouns vs proper names names or other labels. In the example "The man winced, then he fell to the floor." You'd only register "he fell." This would also be biased if male or female characters were named more often.