Differentiating Document Type and Author Personality for Linguistic Features

There are many ways to profile a collection of documents. This paper presents highlight from a body of work that has looked at individual differences in the language of personal weblogs. Firstly, we present a unitary measure of linguistic contextuality based on POS frequency that can be used to profile and rank genres. When applied to weblogs, we will show they are similar to school essays, yet significantly less contextual than e-mail. We then look at individual variation of language, as due to the personality of the author, exploring the use of dictionary based analyses and data-driven n-grams. Under regression, we show that with just a few linguistic features, it is possible to explain significant proportions of variance within personality traits.