Assessing Personality Traits Through Social Media Language

With the emergence of online social media, people increasingly leverage these platforms to build connections and express themselves. In particular, our language reflects the increasing emphasis on personal agency and expression. In this paper, we explored whether language can be a strong predictor of Big Five personality traits on Yelp, a site in which there is no expectation of building a socially desirable profile as do other social media. The linear models of lexical correlates suggest that users that produce high-quality reviews show higher Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness, Conscientiousness, and lower Neuroticism. Feature importance suggests that low-quality reviews show a higher degree of egocentricity while high-quality reviews are more socially oriented.