The Big Five: Discovering Linguistic Characteristics that Typify Distinct Personality Traits across Yahoo! Answers Members

Abstract

In psychology, it is widely believed that
there are five big factors that determine the different
personality traits:
Extraversion, Agreeableness,
Conscientiousness and Neuroticism as well as
Openness.
In the last years, researchers have
started to examine how these factors are manifested
across several social networks like Facebook and
Twitter. However, to the best of our knowledge, other
kinds of social networks such as social/informational
question-answering communities (e.g., Yahoo! Answers)
have been left unexplored.

Therefore, this work explores several predictive
models to automatically recognize these factors across
Yahoo! Answers members. As a means of devising
powerful generalizations, these models were combined
with assorted linguistic features. Since we do not
have access to ask community members to volunteer
for taking the personality test, we built a study
corpus by conducting a discourse analysis based on
deconstructing the test into 112 adjectives.

Our results reveal that it is plausible to lessen the
dependency upon answered tests and that effective
models across distinct factors are sharply different. Also,
sentiment analysis and dependency parsing proven to
be fundamental to deal with extraversion, agreeableness
and conscientiousness. Furthermore, medium and low
levels of neuroticism were found to be related to initial
stages of depression and anxiety disorders.