Recognising Personality Traits Using Facebook Status Updates

Abstract

Gaining insight in a web user's personality is very valuable for applications that rely on personalisation, such as recommender systems and personalised advertising. In this paper we explore the use of machine learning techniques for inferring a user's personality traits from their Facebook status updates. Even with a small set of training examples we can outperform the majority class baseline algorithm. Furthermore, the results are improved by adding training examples from another source. This is an interesting result because it indicates that personality trait recognition generalises across social media platforms.