Predicting hit movie concepts using news articles

An incredible amount of movies are released every year in Japan, and movies that match the viewers´ social needs are the ones that become the big hits. All movies share a common trait in that they all include various “concepts”. For example, the American film “The Matrix” includes the concepts “virtual space”, “artificial intelligence”, “domination”, and others. We have developed a system for predicting hit movie concepts that uses a case base comprised of an immense amount of “ Cause → Consequence” pairs derived from past movies. We consider past hit movies a “consequence” and a news item that has a strong relationship with such movies as a “cause”. When we input new social needs into the system, we can predict hit movies by referring to the case base. Experimental results showed that the proposed system could successfully predict certain parts of what made up a hit movie.