I, Me, Mine: The role of personal phrases in author profiling

Abstract

The Author Profiling (AP) task aims to distinguish between groups of authors labeled by a common demographic characteristic such as gender or age by studying the language usage. In this work we studied the role of personal phrases (i.e., sentences containing first person pronouns) for the AP task. We support the idea that people better expose their personal interests and writing style when they talk about themselves and, consequently, that words near to a personal pronoun reveal valuable information for the classification of authors. The evaluation using different social media data showed that phrases containing singular first person pronouns are highly valuable for predicting the age and gender of users. Considering only these phrases we obtained reductions of up to 60% of the information in the user documents and a comparable classification performance than using all available data. In addition, the results obtained by personal phrases considerably outperformed those from non-personal sentences, indicating their greater suitability for the AP task. We consider these findings could be further applied in the design of strategies for the construction of AP corpora, novel feature selection methods, as well as new feature and instance weighting schemes.