Assessing the Big Five Personality Traits with Latent Semantic Analysis

Abstract

We tested whether the characteristics of a person`s personality can be assessed by an automated analysis of the semantic content of a persons written text. Participants completed a questionnaire measuring the, so called, Big Five personality traits. They also composed five short essays in which they were asked to describe what they would do and how they would feel in each of five scenarios designed to invoke the creation of narrative relevant to the Big Five personality traits. Participants essays were processed for content by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; T. Landauer and S. Dumais, 1997), a model of lexical semantics. We found that LSA could assess individuals on three of the Big Five traits, and we discuss ways to improve such techniques in future work.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 14, 2014
Accession Number
AD1004004

Entities

People

  • Harvey H. Marmurek
  • Natalia Derbentseva
  • Oshin Vartanian
  • Peter J. Kwantes
  • Quan Lam

Organizations

  • Defence Research and Development Canada

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Natural Language Processing
  • Personality
  • Questionnaires
  • Semantics

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.
  • Organizational Psychology.