Past work on personality detection has shown that frequency of lexical
categories such as first person pronouns, past tense verbs, and sentiment words
have significant correlations with personality traits. In this paper, for the
first time, we show that fine affect (emotion) categories such as that of
excitement, guilt, yearning, and admiration are significant indicators of
personality. Additionally, we perform experiments to show that the gains
provided by the fine affect categories are not obtained by using coarse affect
categories alone or with specificity features alone. We employ these features
in five SVM classifiers for detecting five personality traits through essays.
We find that the use of fine emotion features leads to statistically
significant improvement over a competitive baseline, whereas the use of coarse
affect and specificity features does not.Comment: In Proceedings of the ICWSM Workshop on Computational Personality
Recognition, July 2013, Boston, US
