CoupleNet: Paying Attention to Couples with Coupled Attention for Relationship Recommendation

Dating and romantic relationships not only play a huge role in our personal lives but also collectively influence and shape society. Today, many romantic partnerships originate from the Internet, signifying the importance of technology and the web in modern dating. In this paper, we present a text-based computational approach for estimating the relationship compatibility of two users on social media. Unlike many previous works that propose reciprocal recommender systems for online dating websites, we devise a distant supervision heuristic to obtain real world couples from social platforms such as Twitter. Our approach, the CoupleNet is an end-to-end deep learning based estimator that analyzes the social profiles of two users and subsequently performs a similarity match between the users. Intuitively, our approach performs both user profiling and match-making within a unified end-to-end framework. CoupleNet utilizes hierarchical recurrent neural models for learning representations of user profiles and subsequently coupled attention mechanisms to fuse information aggregated from two users. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first data-driven deep learning approach for our novel relationship recommendation problem. We benchmark our CoupleNet against several machine learning and deep learning baselines. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms all approaches significantly in terms of precision. Qualitative analysis shows that our model is capable of also producing explainable results to users.Comment: Accepted at ICWSM 201

Redefining quality interpersonal communication and communication activities in marriage from divorcees’ perspectives

Quality interpersonal communication is essential in the development and maintenance of any relationship, including marriage. As society adapts to new avenues of communication, married couples often underestimate the relevance of interpersonal communication in their relationship due to their lack of understanding of quality interpersonal communication. Therefore, this study investigated the conceptualisation of quality interpersonal communication through the lens of Relational Dialectic Theory and communication activities in marriage from the perspectives of divorcees. This study also explored the antecedents of poor-quality interpersonal communication and its repercussions on married couples. The present study also extended Knapp’s Relational Development Model by incorporating communication technology as a medium of communication. In-depth interviews were conducted on 20 divorcees from different states in Malaysia, chosen through a purposive sampling technique. The gathered data was then evaluated and combined in a thematic data analysis using the NVivo 12 software. This study discovers that the definitions of quality interpersonal communication are divided into seven (7) categories, with communication skills, intimacy, and characters identified as the top three significant traits. Results of this study also indicate that spouses use various medium of communication based on their circumstances but prefer face-to-face communication. However, communication occurrences between spouses are low and mostly negative, with the majority of them mainly involving households and children. The other antecedents of poor-quality interpersonal communication are communication skills, attitudes, third-party involvement, and emotional condition. The current study concludes that emotional condition is one of the protuberant effects of poor-quality interpersonal communication. All in all, the current study provides a new paradigm in Knapp’s Relational Development Model through the incorporation of the effects of poor-quality interpersonal communication into the deterioration stages of the model

Individual differences and romantic compatibility: the relationship between personality traits, eligibility and ideal partner preference

This thesis explores the relationship between personality traits and ideal partner preference. It presents a review of the topic’s salient literature, specifically, research on: theories of romantic attraction; individual differences in ideal partner preference; online and offline platforms for partner selection; personality factors, relationship initiation, maintenance and satisfaction; and tools to assess compatibility. Eight empirical studies of the relationship between the Big Five personality traits, two Dark Triad traits (psychopathy and Machiavellianism), eligibility and expressed preference for an ideal partner are presented. The thesis incorporates development, piloting and validation of a novel, forced-choice instrument for measuring the trade-offs that occur in partner selection. Studies 1 and 2 test a pilot version of the Ideal Partner Questionnaire (IPQ) instrument, to identify the latent constructs that underpin decisions about ideal partner preference and test their relationship with self- and objectively-rated eligibility and personality traits. Study 3 builds on this by testing the IPQ domains with a larger sample, to refine the tool further and explore Big Five personality and gender differences in expressed preference. Study 4 tests the relationship between ideal partner preference, as measured by the IPQ, eligibility and the dark traits Machiavellianism and subclinical psychopathy. Study 5 tests the relationship between ideal partner preference, as measured by the IPQ, eligibility and emotional intelligence. Studies 6 and 7 test whether romantic beliefs and qualitatively expressed preferences predict ideal partner preference, as measured by the IPQ. Study 8 uses data gathered from couples to determine the extent to which ideal preference correlates to personality and relationship satisfaction in established relationships, rather than in the abstract. Lastly, the potential utility of the IPQ, implications for future research and limitations are discusse