Scott Nowson

Large scale personality classification of bloggers

Personality is a fundamental component of an individuals affective behavior. Previous work on personality classification has emerged from disparate sources: Varieties of algorithms and feature-selection across spoken and written data have made comparison difficult. Here, we use a large corpus of blogs to compare classification feature selection; we also use these results to identify characteristic language information relating to personality. Using Support Vector Machines, the best accuracies range from 84.36% (openness to experience) to 70.51% (neuroticism). To achieve these results, the best performing features were a combination of: (1) stemmed bigrams; (2) no exclusion of stopwords (i.e. common words); and (3) the boolean, presence or absence of features noted, rather than their rate of use. We take these findings to suggest that both the structure of the text and the presence of common words are important. We also note that a common dictionary of words used for content analysis (LIWC) performs less well in this classification task, which we propose is due to their conceptual breadth. To get a better sense of how personality is expressed in the blogs, we explore the best performing features and discuss how these can provide a deeper understanding of personality language behavior online.

Verbal irony use in personal blogs

Blogs are a widely growing form of computer-mediated communication used to achieve various personal and professional communicative goals. In the present study, we examined previously posted entries from 71 regular bloggers. We examined the blogs for the use of five forms of verbal irony: hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical question, sarcasm and jocularity. In addition, topic and emotional valence of the ironic utterances were examined. Results showed that hyperbole and understatement were more frequently used than the other forms of ironic language. Discussion of hobbies and social outings was the most commonly occurring topic of ironic language, and bloggers used verbal irony to convey both positive and negative intent. The results of this study demonstrated that adult bloggers do use a variety of forms of verbal irony in their personal blogs, despite the potential risk of being misunderstood.