You Are What You Talk About: Inducing Evaluative Topics for Personality Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for linking evaluative language in social media to personality traits by identifying evaluative topics and creating evaluative profiles, enabling more interpretable personality analysis.

Contribution

It presents a new approach to analyze personality through evaluative topics derived from social media text, bridging a gap in existing research.

Findings

Correlations between evaluative topics and Big Five facets consistent with prior research

Evaluative profiling provides interpretable insights into personality traits

Method applied successfully to Reddit comments with personality labels

Abstract

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.