
IBM researcher can guess your personality from 200 of your tweets - co_pl_te
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/08/ibm-researcher-can-decipher-your-personality-in-200-tweets/
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dsr_
English is such a wonderfully imprecise language. The word personality seems
to be used here as a synonym for "word-choice features we can extract from a
text corpus".

If anyone thinks this gives useful predictors outside of the context of "what
will they Tweet next?", I have a lovely bridge to sell you.

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TelmoMenezes
The assumption is that word-choice features correlate to personality traits.
It's not such a crazy assumption. Of course nobody knows how strong the
correlation is. Humans are messy and complex but also very predictable in many
ways.

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pessimizer
>Of course nobody knows how strong the correlation is.

Or if it exists at all, because it was an assumption.

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peteretep
IBM researcher can produce pretty graph from 200 of your tweets

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hooande
This seems like it would be useful for advertising, but it probably won't be.
It's still difficult to link a social profile to a particlar web page view.
Google and Facebook have a lot of information about everyone but they still
have trouble linking it up all around the web.

I think the real value is in making predictions. Many of the things that
really matter to businesses, like the stock market, government and judicial
system depend heavily on human personalities. Having a better guess at what a
CEO will do is valuable. Predicting what the Fed will do is even more so.
There are countless boards, commitees and commissions that make influential
decisions every day. Having just a slightly better idea about their actions
will be based on their personalities can make a huge difference.

As the article points out, the biggest problem is that there is usually a gap
between what people tweet and what they really think. The author's twitter
feed was more about his persona as an online journalist than his own personal
life. Many people communicate socially as who they want to be rather than who
they actually are. Google could probably find out more about someone's true
personality from the pages that they visit rather than the words that they
use.

This technology still has great promise. One thing algorithms aren't good at
is understanding the quirks of human behavior. Anything that addresses that
problem moves us closer to an automated world.

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r0h1n
> the biggest problem is that there is usually a gap between what people tweet
> and what they really think

I think that's a great feature, not a bug. Thank God there are aspects to our
personalities that algorithm cannot predict based on just a few hundred tweets
or posts.

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jaimebuelta
Mmmmm, this could very well be just a new application of the Forer effect
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect)

~~~
splawn
I was going to say that what they are doing sounds like astrology or hand
writing analysis. I didn't know that it was called the Forer effect, thank
you. Is there even a way for them to test to see if that is happening? How do
you verify personality? However, I am sure they will make tons of money with
this..

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ceautery
...as long as the categories are narrowed to dipshit, narcissist, fundie, and
smug pedant.

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VLM
No they said twitter not HN. Hmm. Maybe this might be more applicable
technology than just Twitter. Kind of like in TV-world the only smartphone is
the iPhone maybe in TV-world the only online discussion area is officially
twitter.

Oh and edited to add that the use of twitter, as far as I know, is a power law
distribution where the higher the usage, the smaller the number of people,
much like the distribution of internet bandwidth use over subscribers. So
requiring 200 tweets means you've already split into a tiny fraction of
humanity, so claiming you can analyze a tiny fraction of humanity does not
equal analyzing humanity in general.

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rocky1138
Couldn't find a link to try it out in the article. Anyone got a link?

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co_pl_te
Also worth reading is this VentureBeat interview with Michelle Zhou about her
research:

[http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/11/how-ibms-michelle-zhou-
fig...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/11/how-ibms-michelle-zhou-figured-out-
my-personality-from-200-tweets-interview/)

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bandy
She needs to analyze the sayings of Lord John Whorfin:

* History is-a made at night. * Character is what you are in the dark. * Laugh while you can, monkey-boy! * Home... home is where you wear your hat.

I'm sure it would be as illuminating as her other analyses.

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pessimizer
Is this "personality" model at all predictive, or is this just astrology?

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dxbydt
WTF is an "IBM researcher" ? Why are we coupling ourselves to corporate
entities in this day & age ? Just use her name & title. The research itself is
pretty iffy.

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barik
I'll give you a serious response, as explained to me in a recent interview I
had for a research scientist position: branding. Some researchers in industry
are given fairly wide latitude in the topics that they are allowed to study.
In these cases, the company usually gets little direct benefit from the output
of the "pet" research idea. For such researchers, their indirect value is the
publications and resulting press that hopefully increases the brand of the
corporation in a more general sense.

I think it's a fair trade off to have to make if you're considering industrial
research. I'd also note that academia isn't much different -- most of those
releases also start with something like "MIT researchers..."

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collyw
Surely people who already have over 200 tweets, must have certain character
similarities, e.g. a bit of an ego, assuming people want to know the crap they
tweet.

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user24
no online demo :(

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trumbitta2
I was disappointed, too

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nsxwolf
The online demo would only need one rule:

if (true) { return "Narcissist" }

:)

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pbharrin
That is great because I have written less than 200 tweets, and so have most of
my friends.

"Machete don't tweet"

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jedanbik
I would love to see how my Facebook statuses portray my personality,
especially were it segmented by year.

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pmccall777
Not impressed. I can guess your personality from one of your tweets.

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bsullivan01
_IBM researcher can decipher your personality from 200 of your tweets_

memo to self, always keep the total number of avail tweets at 199, or 198 just
to be sure.

Google and Facebook might, simply because they know everything about you and
sites you visit.

