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What Machines Understand About Personality Words After Reading The News, Eric David Moyer

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Vector-based lexical semantics is a powerful technique that still has many undiscovered applications. In this thesis I apply a vector-space lexical-semantic model newly developed by Mikolov et. al. trained on skip-grams to the lexical hypothesis in personality psychology. The method produces interpretable dimensions that are consistent across several sets of descriptive personality words. The dimensions include ones for conflict and positive and negative evaluation. However they are more descriptive of word usage semantics than of the characteristics of the thing described and thus do not include a recognizable component of the 5 factor model in their first 14 dimensions. They …