Personality profiling from text and grammar

Abstract

Personality assessment can be used to predict subjects’ use of products and services, thriving in academic programs, and performance in work environments. To avoid the costs and inconvenience of administering personality questionnaires, researchers have inferred author personality from their writings. Extending such methods will enable marketing, interface adaptation, and a variety of data mining applications. The proposed program of research examines elements of syntax, addressing the following questions: does authors’ usage of English grammatical structures reflect their personalities? What methodology extracts and predicts personality from grammar usage? Key to this approach is the use of locally defined grammatical structures as described by Part of Speech n-grams.