Titillating Titles: Uncoding SXSW Proposal Titles with Text Analytics by Jason Baldridge.
From the post:
The proposals for SXSW 2015 have been posted for several weeks now, and the community portion of the process ends this week on Friday, September 5. As a proposer myself for Are You In A Social Media Experiment?, I’ve been meaning to find a chance to look into the titles and see whether some straight-forward Unix commands, text analytics and natural language processing can reveal anything interesting about them.
People reportedly put a lot of thought into their titles since that is a big part of getting your proposal noticed in the community part of the voting process for panels. The creators of proposals for SXSW are given lots of feedback, including things like on their titles.
“Vague, non-descriptive language is a common mistake on titles — but if readers can’t comprehend the basic focus of your proposal without also reading the description, then you probably need to re-think your approach. If you can make the title witty and attention-getting, then wonderful. But please don’t let wit sidetrack you from the more significant goals of simple, accurate and succinct.”
In short, a title should stand out while remaining informative. It turns out that there has been research in computational linguistics into how to craft memorable quotes that is interesting with respect to standing out. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cheng, Kleinberg, and Lee’s (2012) “You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability” found that memorable movie quotes use less common words built on a scaffold of common syntactic patterns (BTW, the paper itself has great section titles). Chan, Lee and Pang (2014) go to the next step of building a model that predicts which of two versions of a tweet will have a better response (in terms of obtaining retweets) (see the demo).
Are you read to take your titles beyond spell-check and grammar correction?
What if you could check your titles at least to make them more memorable? Would you do it?
Jason provides an example of how checking your title for “impact” may not be all that far fetched.
PS: Be sure to try the demo for “better” tweets.