DOCSLIB.ORG

Author Profiling Using Stylistic and N-Gram Features

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Author Profiling Using Stylistic and N-Gram Features International Journal of Engineering and Advanced Technology (IJEAT) ISSN: 2249 – 8958, Volume-9 Issue-1, October 2019 Author Profiling using Stylistic and N-Gram Features Radha D, Chandra Sekhar P Authorship Profiling [1]. The Plagiarism Detection detects Abstract: The World Wide Web is increasing tremendously with the percentage of authors contribution is copied from other massive amount of textual content primarily through social media author‟s contributions [2]. Authorship Identification sites. Most of the users are not interested to upload their genuine classified into two classes namely Authorship Verification details along with textual content to these sites. To identify the correct information of the authors the researchers started a new and Authorship Attribution. Authorship Verification verifies research area named as Authorship Analysis. The authorship whether the anonymous document was written by the Analysis is used to find the details of the authors by examining suspected author or not by investigating the suspected their text. Authorship Profiling is one type of Authorship author‟s documents [3]. Authorship Attribution detects the Analysis, which is used to detect the demographic characteristics author of an unknown document by investigating the like Age, Gender, Location, Educational Background, Nativity Language and Personality Traits of the authors by examining documents of given set of authors [4]. Authorship Profiling writing skills in their written text. Stylometry is one research area discover the demographic characteristics of an author by defines a set of stylometric features namely word based, character investigating the writing style in their texts [5]. In Authorship based, syntactic, structural and content based features for Identification, the training data need suspected authors differentiating the author’s writing styles. In this work, the documents to recognize the document‟s author. But in experimentation conducted with various stylistic features, N-grams and content based features for gender prediction. These Authorship Profiling, the suspected author‟s documents need features are used for representing the vectors of documents. The not required in training data to detect the characteristics of the classification algorithms produce the model by processing these suspected author. This is the major difference among vectors. Two classification algorithms namely Random Forest, Authorship Identification and Authorship Profiling [7]. Naïve Bayes Multinomial were used for classification. We Authorship Profiling is used in information processing concentrated on prediction of Gender from 2019 Pan Competition applications such as harassing messages, forensic analysis, Twitter dataset. Our approach obtained best accuracies when compared with many Authorship Profiling approaches. security, educational domain, literary research and marketing [6]. In social websites, people are involved in different crimes Keywords : Authorship Analysis, Authorship Profiling, like public embarrassment by sending harassing messages, Accuracy, Content based Features, Gender Prediction, N-grams, blackmailing, defamation, stalking and creation of profiles Stylistic Features. with fake details. All these crimes are in the form of messages. The authorship profiling is used here to analyze the harassing I. INTRODUCTION messages and detect the basic characteristics like gender, age In the last 20 years, Internet has evolved from a network of group, location of messages of authors. In forensic analysis, connected computers used to share data among researchers. the forensic experts analyze the property wills and suicide As a result of this growth and the birth of social networks, notes to detect the details of the suspected author. In this blogs and many other websites where users are given the context Authorship Profiling is one such technique helpful for opportunity of easily creating or uploading content and the this purpose. The terrorist organizations send letters and mails amount of data generated every day has also grown to threaten the government bodies. The Authorship Profiling immensely. Most of the generated data in the net is thus approaches were used in security to analyze these mails and unstructured. One of the characteristics of the Internet whether the messages came from suspected sources or not. In nowadays is that a user can post anonymously in forums, marketing point of view, the market people are analyzing their comment sections of articles, social networks, chat systems, products based on the reviews of their product. Based on the etc. The Authorship Analysis is one research area analysis of reviews they will take strategic decisions about concentrated by the many researchers to find the details of the their products. Authorship Profiling is used to analyze the authors by analyzing their written textual content. reviews of products and find the details of reviewers like Authorship Analysis is categorized into three techniques gender, age, location etc. Authorship Profiling is used in such as Plagiarism Detection, Authorship Identification and educational domain also. In educational domain, the researchers are able to find the exceptional talented students, the knowledge level of student by analyzing the written texts Revised Manuscript Received on October 05, 2019 of the students. In the case of literary and historic studies, Radha D*, department of CSE, Malla Reddy College of Engineering and Technology, Hyderabad, India. Authorship Profiling can be applied to confirm/refute the Email: [email protected] author characteristics of a Chandra Sekhar P, department of CSE, GITAM, Visakhapatnam, India. text. Email: [email protected] Published By: Retrieval Number: A1621109119/2019©BEIESP Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering DOI: 10.35940/ijeat.A1621.109119 3044 & Sciences Publication Author Profiling using Stylistic and N-Gram Features Different researchers identified several variances in writing section 6. The results discussed in section 7. The section 8 style of female and male by analyzing their datasets. Koppel describes conclusions of this work and possible directions et al. analyzed [6] large corpus of documents and concluded also. that woman used more number of pronouns and men used more determiners and quantifiers in their writings. In general, II. RELATED WORK the author style of writing depends on the grammar rules they One of the first studies on performing author profiling with followed, topics they selected and words they used. They machine learning techniques was done by Argamon et al. observed that, the female discussed the topics like kitty [10]. The study observed that the correct linguistic features parties, shopping and beauty in their writings whereas the combination were useful to distinguish the characteristics of male concentrated on topics like technology, politics and an author‟s text. The scientific event PAN competition sports in their writings. In another observation [3], the males arranged several author profiling tasks during the last few more written about politics and technology and female years, welcoming anyone with interest to participate. The discussed about marriage styles. They also observed that, the competition considered different aspects like age, gender, adverbs and adjectives usage is more in female writings than personality traits and native language in author profiling task. male writings. SVMs was used by the majority of the participants [11, 12], The words selected for writing a review or a blog is but also random forest [13], logistic regression [11] and many different based on the concept discussed in those sites. There more algorithms was used. Vollenbroek et al. used [14] linear is a possibility of classify a document whether the document SVM and achieved the highest average accuracy of 52.58 % was written by female or male based on the words occurred in by extracting various Stylometry features. However, a document. The presence of words like boyfriend, my Modaresi et al. also extracted part-of-speech taggings, various husband and pink in a document improves the chances of Stylometry features and lexical features, but used those document written by female authors and the presence of features to train a logistic regression classifier. They got words like cricket and world cup in a text improves the average accuracy of 52.47 % and concluded that chances of text written by male authors. They also observed part-of-speech taggings were not suitable features when that when compared with male authors the female authors testing on domain independence [15]. used less number of prepositions in their writings [1]. The most often explored demographic traits in the literature In [8], they found that the experimentation with only are clearly gender and age. In [1], the authors describe two content based features was more effective to distinguish the experiments on the Blog Corpus to identify gender and age. writing style of female and male authors and also identified For both experiments, stylistic features such as function that the accuracy is reduced when experiment with content words, part-of-speech frequencies, blog words and hyperlinks based features along with other features. Some other as well as the 1,000 most relevant unigrams according to the researchers [9] identified that male used more prepositions, Information Gain metric are extracted. The chosen classifier articles and longer words in their writings whereas female is the Multi-class Real
Load more

Recommended publications
  • PAN 2017: Author Profiling
    PAN 2017: Author Profiling - Gender and Language Variety Prediction Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2017 Matej Martinc1;2, Iza Škrjanec2, Katja Zupan1;2, and Senja Pollak1 1 Jožef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia 2 Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia [email protected],[email protected], [email protected],[email protected] Abstract We present the results of gender and language variety identification performed on the tweet corpus prepared for the PAN 2017 Author profiling shared task. Our approach consists of tweet preprocessing, feature construction, feature weighting and classification model construction. We propose a Logistic regres- sion classifier, where the main features are different types of character and word n-grams. Additional features include POS n-grams, emoji and document senti- ment information, character flooding and language variety word lists. Our model achieved the best results on the Portuguese test set in both—gender and language variety—prediction tasks with the obtained accuracy of 0.8600 and 0.9838, re- spectively. The worst accuracy was achieved on the Arabic test set. Keywords: author profiling, gender, language variety, Twitter 1 Introduction Recent trends in natural language processing (NLP) have shown a great interest in learn- ing about the demographics, psychological characteristics and (mental) health of a per- son based on the text she or he produced. This field, generally known as author profiling (AP), has various applications in marketing, security (forensics), research in social psy- chology, and medical diagnosis. A thriving subfield of AP is computational stylometry, which is concerned with how the content and genre of a document contribute to its style [4].
    [Show full text]
  • Author Profiling: Predicting Age and Gender from Blogs
    Author Profiling: Predicting Age and Gender from Blogs Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013 K Santosh, Romil Bansal, Mihir Shekhar, and Vasudeva Varma International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad {santosh.kosgi, romil.bansal, mihir.shekhar}@research.iiit.ac.in, [email protected] Abstract Author profiling is the task of determining age, gender, native language or personality type of author by studying their sociolect aspect, that is, how lan- guage is shared by people. In this paper, we propose a Machine Learning ap- proach to determine unknown author’s age and gender. The approach uses three types of features: content based, style based and topic based. We were able to achieve an accuracy of 64.08%, 64.30% for age and 56.53%, 64.73% for gender in English and Spanish respectively. Keywords: Author Profiling, Topic Modelling, Text Categorization, Natural Lan- guage Processing 1 Introduction The problem of identifying the user’s profile from the text is always of importance as it helps in various fields like forensics and marketing. For example, in marketing, a manager might want to find the gender and age group of people who like or dislike their products from the public reviews. The increasing accessibility of public blogs offers an unprecedented opportunity to harvest information from texts authored by hundreds of thousands of different authors. In this paper, we tried to exploit these public blogs to find the relations between the author’s profile and the language style used by them. The main idea behind this task is to analyse how everyday languages reflects basic social and personality traits.
    [Show full text]
  • Automatic Author Profiling Based on Linguistic and Stylistic Features Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013
    Automatic Author Profiling Based on Linguistic and Stylistic Features Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013 Braja Gopal Patra1, Somnath Banerjee1, Dipankar Das2, Tanik Saikh1, Sivaji Bandyopadhyay1 1Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Jadavpur University, India 2Department of Computer Science & Engineering, NIT Meghalaya, India {brajagopal.cse, s.banerjee1980, dipankar.dipnil2005, tanik4u}@gmail.com, [email protected] Abstract. The rapid expansion of blog and electronic data in Web 2.0 is abounding and thus it is becoming important to identify the author‟s profile also. The problems of automatic identification of author‟s gender and age based on linguistic and stylistic pattern have been a subject of increasingly research interest in the recent years. The research methodologies are also helpful for several other applications like criminal detection, security and author detection etc. We have used lexical, syntactic and structural features for identifying the gender and age group of the authors. We have employed the Decision tree classifier for classifying the author profile. We have achieved the accuracies of 56.83% and 28.95% for gender and age group classification, respectively. Key words: Automatic author profiling, gender identification, age group identification, word class, decision tree. 1 Introduction In the 21st century, popularity of the Internet is increasing abundantly. Internet media like emails, blogs/internet forum and websites have been identified as the ideal communication platform for the people. In the recent years, the researchers have been paid increasingly interest to analyze of authorship of emails, electronic messages [5] and plagiarism detection [7] etc. Thus, analyzing the web content has become more important to the intelligence and security agencies that monitor the author information as much as possible [1].
    [Show full text]
  • Arabic Twitter User Profiling: Application to Cyber-Security
    Arabic Twitter User Profiling: Application to Cyber-security Rahma Basti1, Salma Jamoussi2, Anis Charfi3 and Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou4 1Multimedia InfoRmation Systems and Advanced Computing Laboratory (MIRACL), University of Sfax, Tunis, Tunisia 2Higher Institute of Computer Sceience and Multimedia of Sfax, 1173 Sfax 3038, Tunisia 3Carnegie Mellon University Qatar, Qatar 4Digital Research Center of Sfax (DRCS), Tunisia Keywords: Author Profiling, Arabic Text Processing, Age and Gender Prediction, Dangerous Profiles, Stylometric Features. Abstract: In recent years, we witnessed a rapid growth of social media networking and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter. In these sites, users provide a variety of data such as their personal data, interests, and opinions. However, this data shared is not always true. Often, social media users hide behind a fake profile and may use it to spread rumors or threaten others. To address that, different methods and techniques were proposed for user profiling. In this article, we use machine learning for user profiling in order to predict the age and gender of a user’s profile and we assess whether it is a dangerous profile using the users’ tweets and features. Our approach uses several stylistic features such as characters based, words based and syntax based. Moreover, the topics of interest of a user are included in the profiling task. We obtained the best accuracy levels with SVM and these were respectively 73.49% for age, 83.7% for gender, and 88.7% for the dangerous profile detection. 1 INTRODUCTION researchers to use it including those who focus on user profiling (Feldman and Sanger, 2006). Social media networks allow users to share Research in psychology (Frank and Witten, 1998) information, opinions and communicate with each has revealed that the words used by an individual can other.
    [Show full text]
  • Author Profiling for English and Spanish Text
    Author Profiling for English and Spanish Text Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013 Upendra Sapkota1, Thamar Solorio1, Manuel Montes-y-Gómez2, and Gabriela Ramírez-de-la-Rosa1 1 University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294, USA {upendra,solorio,gabyrr}@cis.uab.edu, 2 Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica, Puebla, Mexico [email protected] Abstract This paper describes an approach for the author profiling task of the PAN 2013 challenge. This work is based on the idea of linguistic modality3 that has been successfully used in other classification tasks such as authorship attri- bution. We consider three different modalities: syntactic, stylistic, and semantic, each representing a different aspect of text. For each modality, we extract infor- mative meta features by computing the similarity relations between the feature vectors in the test files and the centroids of modality specific clusters. Since we were provided texts in both Spanish and English, we build a language indepen- dent framework for author profiling. For both English and Spanish documents, our system performed well for the age identification task. For gender prediction, although our system could not perform as expected for English, it yielded good results on Spanish. Keywords: author profiling, linguistic modality, similarity relations 1 Introduction With the proliferation of social media (blogs, chats), it has been possible to access large online texts. Such large texts can be utilized to understand how the writing style among users of different age groups, as well as between male and female vary [1,2]. Unlike the authorship attribution problem where the task is to identify the true author of a given piece of text, the author profiling task tries to learn as much information as possible (demographics, personality) about the unknown writer of the given text.
    [Show full text]
  • Author Profiling from Facebook Corpora
    Author Profiling from Facebook Corpora Fernando Chiu Hsieh, Rafael Felipe Sandroni Dias, Ivandre´ Paraboni University of Sao˜ Paulo, School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities Sao˜ Paulo, Brazil [email protected] , [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Author profiling - the computational task of prediction author’s demographics from text - has been a popular research topic in the NLP field, and also the focus of a number of prominent shared tasks. Author profiling is a problem of growing importance, with applications in forensics, security, sales and many others. In recent years, text available from social networks has become a primary source for computational models of author profiling, but existing studies are still largely focused on age and gender prediction, and are in many cases limited to the use of English text. Other languages, and other author profiling tasks, remain somewhat less popular. As a means to further this issue, in this work we present initial results of a number of author profiling tasks from a Facebook corpus in the Brazilian Portuguese language. As in previous studies, our own work will focus on both standard gender and age prediction tasks but, in addition to these, we will also address two less usual author profiling tasks, namely, predicting an author’s degree of religiosity and IT background status. The tasks are modelled by making use of different knowledge sources, and results of alternative approaches are discussed. Keywords: Author profiling, Document Classification, Corpus-based approaches 1. Introduction existing author profiling models are reviewed in Section 2. Our own approach and corpus are described in Section 3.
    [Show full text]
  • A Study of Arabic Social Media Users—Posting Behavior and Author's
    Cognitive Computation (2019) 11:71–86 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-018-9592-7 A Study of Arabic Social Media Users—Posting Behavior and Author’s Gender Prediction Abdulrahman I. Al-Ghadir1 · Aqil M. Azmi1 Received: 16 August 2016 / Accepted: 4 September 2018 / Published online: 24 September 20 18 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Social media opens up numerous possibilities to study human interaction and collective behavior in an unprecedented scale. It opened a whole new venue for research under the name “social computing”. Researchers are interested in profiling individuals (e.g., gender, age group), groups, community, and networking. We are interested in studying the collective behavior of Arabic social media users. Most studies covering Arabic social media has focused on the sentiment analysis of, say tweets. This study, however, looks into who and when users interact with the Arabic social media. Specifically, there are two objectives of this work. First, studying the demographic posting behavior of social media users from two different perspectives: gender and educational level. Second, author profiling. Identifying author’s gender of a social media post. We use Saudi Arabia, a very prolific country when it comes to social media in general, as a backdrop for this study. The results in this study are based on mining huge amount of metadata of a popular local social media forum covering the period 2011– 14 inclusive. The extracted features (normalized list of k highest scoring words, and likewise for stems) from the posts were used to train classifiers to identify the author’s gender.
    [Show full text]
  • An Evaluation Study of Authorship Attribution Approaches
    Neural and Non-neural Approaches to Authorship Attribution A Thesis submitted to the University of Sheffield for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Engineering by Yunita Sari Department of Computer Science The University of Sheffield September 2018 ii Neural and Non-neural Approaches to Authorship Attribution ABSTRACT This thesis explores a range of authorship attribution approaches and proposes new techniques to improve performance. Authorship attribution is the task of identifying the author of a text. It has attracted attention due to its relevance to a wide range of applications including forensic investigation and plagiarism detection. An array of features and approaches have been applied to this task. However, there has been a lack of study which involves multiple datasets or uses a range of different classifiers. Therefore, in this thesis we explore both neural and non-neural network models and use different feature representations on multiple datasets. We begin with a short introduction to authorship attribution in Chapter 1. A more comprehensive review of authorship attribution and its related tasks is given in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 we introduces a novel analysis using topic mod- eling to examine the conditions under which each type of authorship attribution feature is useful. Chapter 4 explores the implementation of language modeling for authorship attribution. We describe the feature selection issue in standard authorship attribution approaches and evaluate whether n-gram language mod- eling can help to address the problem. Furthermore, we implement A Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) language model for authorship attribution and assess its effectiveness for the task.
    [Show full text]
  • Automatic Author Profiling of Online Chat Logs
    Calhoun: The NPS Institutional Archive Theses and Dissertations Thesis Collection 2007-03 Automatic author profiling of online chat logs Lin, Jane. Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School http://hdl.handle.net/10945/3559 NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA THESIS AUTOMATIC AUTHOR PROFILING OF ONLINE CHAT LOGS by Jane Lin March 2007 Thesis Advisor: Craig H. Martell Second Reader: Kevin M. Squire Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK REPORT DOCUMENTATION PAGE Form Approved OMB No. 0704- 0188 Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instruction, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to Washington headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington, VA 22202-4302, and to the Office of Management and Budget, Paperwork Reduction Project (0704-0188) Washington DC 20503. 1. AGENCY USE ONLY (Leave blank) 2. REPORT DATE 3. REPORT TYPE AND DATES COVERED March 2007 Master’s Thesis 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Automatic Author Profiling of 5. FUNDING NUMBERS Online Chat Logs 6. AUTHOR(S) Jane Lin 7. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION Naval Postgraduate School REPORT NUMBER Monterey, CA 93943-5000 9. SPONSORING /MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 10. SPONSORING/MONITORING N/A AGENCY REPORT NUMBER 11. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES The views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Impact of Emotions on Author Profiling
    Information Processing and Management xxx (2015) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Information Processing and Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/infoproman On the impact of emotions on author profiling ⇑ Francisco Rangel a,b, , Paolo Rosso a a NLE Lab, Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera, S/N, Valencia, Spain b Autoritas Consulting, C/ Lorenzo Solano Tendero 7, Madrid, Spain article info abstract Article history: In this paper, we investigate the impact of emotions on author profiling, concretely Received 15 May 2014 identifying age and gender. Firstly, we propose the EmoGraph method for modelling the Received in revised form 27 May 2015 way people use the language to express themselves on the basis of an emotion-labelled Accepted 1 June 2015 graph. We apply this representation model for identifying gender and age in the Spanish Available online xxxx partition of the PAN-AP-13 corpus, obtaining comparable results to the best performing systems of the PAN Lab of CLEF. Keywords: Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Affective processing Author profiling Emotion-labelled graphs EmoGraph 1. Introduction Seth Godin1 says ‘‘Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell’’. In this sense, world is rapidly changing, social media are growing on daily basis and customers are becoming users looking for new experiences. Thus the need of automatically processing the affective content of social media is acquiring a growing importance in order to know what the users want and need. The potentiality offered by social media from many perspectives such as marketing, security or health is undeniable.
    [Show full text]
  • Authorship Attribution and Author Profiling of Lithuanian Literary Texts
    Authorship Attribution and Author Profiling of Lithuanian Literary Texts Jurgita Kapociˇ ut¯ e-Dzikien˙ e˙ Andrius Utka Ligita Šarkute˙ Vytautas Magnus University Vytautas Magnus University Kaunas Univ. of Technology K. Donelaicioˇ 58, LT-44248, K. Donelaicioˇ 58, LT-44248, K. Donelaicioˇ 73, LT-44029, Kaunas, Lithuania Kaunas, Lithuania Kaunas, Lithuania [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract posts, Internet comments, tweets, etc.) the au- thorship analysis is becoming more and more top- In this work we are solving authorship at- ical. In this respect it is important to consider tribution and author profiling tasks (by fo- the anonymity factor, as it allows everyone to ex- cusing on the age and gender dimensions) press their opinions freely, but on the other hand, for the Lithuanian language. This paper opens a gate for different cyber-crimes. Therefore reports the first results on literary texts, the authorship research –which for a long time which we compared to the results, pre- in the past was mainly focused on literary ques- viously obtained with different functional tions of unknown or disputed authorship– drifts to- styles and language types (i.e., parliamen- wards more practical applications in such domains tary transcripts and forum posts). as forensics, security, user targeted services, etc. Available text corpora, linguistic tools, and sophis- Using the Naïve Bayes Multinomial and ticated methods even more accelerate the devel- Support Vector Machine methods we in- opment of the authorship research field, which is vestigated an impact of various stylistic, no longer limited to authorship attribution (when character, lexical, morpho-syntactic fea- identifying who, from a closed-set of candidate tures, and their combinations; the differ- authors, is the actual author of a given anonymous ent author set sizes of 3, 5, 10, 20, 50, text document) only.
    [Show full text]
  • Writer Profiling Without the Writer's Text
    Writer Profiling Without the Writer’s Text David Jurgens, Yulia Tsvetkov, and Dan Jurafsky Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94095, USA, fjurgens,tsvetkov,[email protected] Abstract. Social network users may wish to preserve their anonymity online by masking their identity and not using language associated with any particular demographics or personality. However, they have no control over the language in incoming communications. We show that linguistic cues in public comments directed at a user are sufficient for an accurate inference of that user’s gender, age, religion, diet, and even personality traits. Moreover, we show that directed communication is even more predictive of a user’s profile than the user’s own language. We then conduct a nuanced analysis of what types of social relation- ships are most predictive of users’ attributes, and propose new strategies on how individuals can modulate their online social relationships and incoming commu- nications to preserve their anonymity. 1 Introduction Communication is the crux of online social platforms and the messages people write can reveal substantial information about their identity, such as their demographic at- tributes, personality, location, native language, or socioeconomic status. Knowledge of a person’s identity benefits many downstream applications including commercial ones, which has led to a significant effort to develop methods that infer an author’s latent attributes automatically from their writings. Most profiling and demographic inference methods focus on the text an individual writes. However, individuals also communicate directly with others, raising the question of how much incoming messages reveal about a recipient. Further, such directed speech also raises an important privacy concern: al- though people can opt to self-censor information to reveal less of their identity through the statements they make [63, 2, 62, 85], a person does not control what their friends say to them, potentially exposing much about their identity.
    [Show full text]