@inproceedings{wang-lyu-2026-beyond,
    title = "Beyond Genre Categories: How Narrative Pattern Coherence and Spanning Distance Shape Film Success",
    author = "Wang, Zhichao  and
      Lyu, Zeyu",
    editor = {Hamilton, Sil  and
      {\"O}hman, Emily  and
      Hicke, Rebecca M. M.  and
      Bizzoni, Yuri  and
      Bax, Axel  and
      Matthews, Jacob A.  and
      H{\"a}m{\"a}l{\"a}inen, Mika},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.nlp4dh-1.13/",
    pages = "132--137",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-427-9",
    abstract = "Prior research on cultural markets has relied on genre labels to distinguish products, overlooking the specific content features that differentiate films within the same genre. We address this gap using tropes as building blocks of narrative structure. From a dataset of 30k tropes across 18k films (TVTropes.org), we identify 29 narrative patterns via community detection and characterize each film by two measures: coherence (how concentrated its tropes are within a few patterns) and spanning distance (how far apart the patterns it combines are). Regression analyses show that coherence improves both audience evaluations and attention, while spanning distance increases evaluations but reduces attention. These findings extend category-spanning theory from genre labels to the internal narrative composition of films, demonstrating how stories are constructed and shape audience responses."
}