The Adrenaline Factor: Finding Drama in Ordinary Life

Eli KatzDirector of Algorithms

What is Drama ?

A state, situation, or series of events involving interesting or intense conflict of forces

Why drama matters?

BecauseEverything around us is vying for attention…and our minds need to decide.

So how does our mind decide?

Cognitive Patterns

Bad News

Lists Negation

Glamour

Definitiveness

Example facebook

dog's butts are the ultimate weapon against cats 1934 22188

robin williams dead in apparent suicide 4027 15489

dogs annoying cats with friendship 3198 12545

brittany maynard ends her own life 33143 11099

tom magliozzi, popular co-host of npr's 'car talk,' dies at 77 4394 7394

mystery respiratory virus likely to hit kids across country 1261 6722

robin williams dead at 63; oscar winner and comedy legend found dead at home 8245 4776

robin williams dead at 63 | ew.com 2335 4619

puppies vs. stairs 1713 4466

planes in near miss at barcelona airport 4399 4203

aussie commuters push train to free trapped passenger 7784 4152

' rickety' staircase leading to maracana stadium 1086 4114

Top feeds by sharing – People are drawn to bad news …

The power of lists …

14 Confessions Of A Drag Cabaret Performer

19 Mind-Blowing Facts Every ’90s Kid Would Want To Know

19 Problems Only People Who Hate Milk Will Understand

17 Times Dave Grohl Was Totally Right About Everything

Surprising sentence structures e.g. negations

So, people are drawn to drama …

Which explains why …People engage dramatic calls to action (Click, Like,Share ...)

Can we predict engagement by measuring the drama ?

Drama Meter: Part 1Patterns

• 10 things you didn’t know about …• Why everything you knew about X is wrong• Man reunites with live-saving dog

• We collected 300k headers• We used POS tagger to create a pattern for each

header• We grouped identical / similar patterns• Top pattern groups represent dramatic / engage-able

patterns

Drama Meter: Part 2Definitiveness

• The woman ate the cake

• Someone ate a cake• The woman ate something• I think the woman ate the cake• Maybe the woman ate something

Drama Meter: Part 2Definitiveness

• I love my wife!

• I like this woman• I think I love her• I have strong feelings for Sarah

Drama Meter: Part 3Sentiment Value

Corpus-based, Automatically-generated~ 150k lemmas

EXHILARATING:VERB:3 KIDNEY FAILURE:SUBJ:-3EXILE:OBJECT:-4 KILLED:VERB:-3EXILE:SUBJ:-4 KILLING:VERB:-3EXONERATED:VERB:2 KILLS:OBJECT:-3KIDNAPPED:VERB:-3 KILLS:SUBJ:-3KIDNAPPING:OBJECT:-3 KILLS:VERB:-3KIDNAPPING:SUBJ:-3 KISS:OBJECT:2KIDNAPPING:VERB:-3 KISS:SUBJ:2KIDNEY FAILURE:OBJECT:-3 KISS:VERB:2

Q&A