A more qualitative approach to personality profiling on Twitter ! ! SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE Frank Houweling 10199969 MASTER INFORMATION STUDIES HUMAN-CENTERED MULTIMEDIA FACULTY OF SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM June 20, 2015 1st Supervisor 2nd Supervisor dr. Maarten Marx MSc. Christophe van Gysel ILPS, UvA ILPS, UvA ! A more qualitative approach to personality profiling on Twitter [Master Thesis] Frank Houweling University of Amsterdam Master Information Studies Human Centered Multimedia
[email protected] ABSTRACT new possibilities to apply author profiling technology. For In di↵erent fields, the interest in author profiling: determin- example in politics, where party leaders often try to portray ing demographic features for an author is growing. Complex a certain type of personality to the voters, in order to become features without a ground truth like (perceived) personality likable candidates [5]. With author profiling systems, the require another approach then traditional author profiling. process of determining personality can potentially turn out In this research, a gold standard that is constructed using to be faster, easier and more reliable than existing (manual) the personality test by Rammstedt and Oliver (2007) is com- methods. pared with a new author-profiling method. This method consists of analysis of all information available about a twit- Existing research on author profiling is characterized by ter profile, using measures that are based on personality a rather uniform methodology. A supervised classifier is characteristics found in existing research. While the person- trained using a ground truth data set of authors’ person- alities that result from this method di↵er greatly from the alities and a broad range of mostly textual features.