3 ms·

do you have a source/more info on your last paragraph?

fxtentacle 5y ago
I do :) "We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age." https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- xioxox 5y ago
  Is it just me, or are most of the results in that paper rather obvious and not very useful in general, outside of social media posts. In Facebook posts, it's not surprising that men talk more about computer games and sport, and swear more. Women using more emotion words and men more object words, is again fairly obvious. If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    > If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well. It should be a pretty easy test to do, for those with the trained classifier; I wonder why they haven't reported on doing it.
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    > Women using more emotion words and men more object words, is again fairly obvious. Is it? I think it's rather interesting. Though not really as much of a language dialect rather than a perspective shift, as if the men and women on average interpret the world differently.
- yorwba 5y ago
  It seems like the differences in word choice are strongly driven by the topics people choose to talk about on Facebook. Besides obvious cases like "shopping" vs. "xbox" there's also more subtle things like > we noticed ‘my wife’ and ‘my girlfriend’ emerged as strongly correlated in the male results, while simply ‘husband’ and ‘boyfriend’ were most predictive for females. Investigating the frequency data revealed that males did in fact precede such references to their opposite-sex partner with ‘my’ significantly more often than females. On the other hand, females were more likely to precede ‘husband’ or ‘boyfriend’ with ‘her’ or ‘amazing’ and a greater variety of words, which is why ‘my husband’ was not more predictive than ‘husband’ alone. Furthermore, this suggests the male preference for the possessive ‘my’ is at least partially due to a lack of talking about others' partners. To disentangle the effect of topic choice from word choice, you'd probably need a controlled study with fixed writing prompts.

I do :) "We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age." https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

xioxox 5y ago
Is it just me, or are most of the results in that paper rather obvious and not very useful in general, outside of social media posts. In Facebook posts, it's not surprising that men talk more about computer games and sport, and swear more. Women using more emotion words and men more object words, is again fairly obvious. If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  > If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well. It should be a pretty easy test to do, for those with the trained classifier; I wonder why they haven't reported on doing it.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  > Women using more emotion words and men more object words, is again fairly obvious. Is it? I think it's rather interesting. Though not really as much of a language dialect rather than a perspective shift, as if the men and women on average interpret the world differently.
yorwba 5y ago
It seems like the differences in word choice are strongly driven by the topics people choose to talk about on Facebook. Besides obvious cases like "shopping" vs. "xbox" there's also more subtle things like > we noticed ‘my wife’ and ‘my girlfriend’ emerged as strongly correlated in the male results, while simply ‘husband’ and ‘boyfriend’ were most predictive for females. Investigating the frequency data revealed that males did in fact precede such references to their opposite-sex partner with ‘my’ significantly more often than females. On the other hand, females were more likely to precede ‘husband’ or ‘boyfriend’ with ‘her’ or ‘amazing’ and a greater variety of words, which is why ‘my husband’ was not more predictive than ‘husband’ alone. Furthermore, this suggests the male preference for the possessive ‘my’ is at least partially due to a lack of talking about others' partners. To disentangle the effect of topic choice from word choice, you'd probably need a controlled study with fixed writing prompts.