Pushing on Personality Detection from Verbal Behavior: A Transformer Meets Text Contours of Psycholinguistic Features

Elma Kerz, Yu Qiao, Sourabh Zanwar, Daniel Wiechmann


Abstract
Research at the intersection of personality psychology, computer science, and linguistics has recently focused increasingly on modeling and predicting personality from language use. We report two major improvements in predicting personality traits from text data: (1) to our knowledge, the most comprehensive set of theory-based psycholinguistic features and (2) hybrid models that integrate a pre-trained Transformer Language Model BERT and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) networks trained on within-text distributions (‘text contours’) of psycholinguistic features. We experiment with BLSTM models (with and without Attention) and with two techniques for applying pre-trained language representations from the transformer model - ‘feature-based’ and ‘fine-tuning’. We evaluate the performance of the models we built on two benchmark datasets that target the two dominant theoretical models of personality: the Big Five Essay dataset (Pennebaker and King, 1999) and the MBTI Kaggle dataset (Li et al., 2018). Our results are encouraging as our models outperform existing work on the same datasets. More specifically, our models achieve improvement in classification accuracy by 2.9% on the Essay dataset and 8.28% on the Kaggle MBTI dataset. In addition, we perform ablation experiments to quantify the impact of different categories of psycholinguistic features in the respective personality prediction models.
Anthology ID:
2022.wassa-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Valentin Barriere, Shabnam Tafreshi, Sawsan Alqahtani, João Sedoc, Roman Klinger, Alexandra Balahur
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
182–194
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wassa-1.17
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.wassa-1.17
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elma Kerz, Yu Qiao, Sourabh Zanwar, and Daniel Wiechmann. 2022. Pushing on Personality Detection from Verbal Behavior: A Transformer Meets Text Contours of Psycholinguistic Features. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis, pages 182–194, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pushing on Personality Detection from Verbal Behavior: A Transformer Meets Text Contours of Psycholinguistic Features (Kerz et al., WASSA 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wassa-1.17.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.wassa-1.17.mp4