Machine-learning framework finds characters’ actions in movie scripts reflect gender stereotypes

Researchers have developed a novel machine-learning framework that uses scene descriptions in movie scripts to automatically recognize different characters’ actions. Applying the framework to hundreds of movie scripts showed that these actions tend to reflect widespread gender stereotypes, some of which are found to be consistent across time. Victor Martinez and colleagues at the University of Southern California, U.S., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on December 21.