You Are What You Talk About: Inducing Evaluative Topics for Personality Analysis
This work addresses the gap in understanding personality through language for social media analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing topic modeling and personality psychology methods.
The paper tackled the problem of linking personality traits to evaluative language by introducing evaluative topics from social media text, and found correlations with Big Five personality facets consistent with prior psychology research.
Expressing attitude or stance toward entities and concepts is an integral part of human behavior and personality. Recently, evaluative language data has become more accessible with social media's rapid growth, enabling large-scale opinion analysis. However, surprisingly little research examines the relationship between personality and evaluative language. To bridge this gap, we introduce the notion of evaluative topics, obtained by applying topic models to pre-filtered evaluative text from social media. We then link evaluative topics to individual text authors to build their evaluative profiles. We apply evaluative profiling to Reddit comments labeled with personality scores and conduct an exploratory study on the relationship between evaluative topics and Big Five personality facets, aiming for a more interpretable, facet-level analysis. Finally, we validate our approach by observing correlations consistent with prior research in personality psychology.