Automatic identification of writers’ intentions: Comparing different methods for predicting relationship goals in online dating profile texts
Chris van der Lee, Tess van der Zanden, Emiel Krahmer, Maria Mos, Alexander Schouten
Abstract
Psychologically motivated, lexicon-based text analysis methods such as LIWC (Pennebaker et al., 2015) have been criticized by computational linguists for their lack of adaptability, but they have not often been systematically compared with either human evaluations or machine learning approaches. The goal of the current study was to assess the effectiveness and predictive ability of LIWC on a relationship goal classification task. In this paper, we compared the outcomes of (1) LIWC, (2) machine learning, and (3) a human baseline. A newly collected corpus of online dating profile texts (a genre not explored before in the ACL anthology) was used, accompanied by the profile writers’ self-selected relationship goal (long-term versus date). These three approaches were tested by comparing their performance on identifying both the intended relationship goal and content-related text labels. Results show that LIWC and machine learning models correlate with human evaluations in terms of content-related labels. LIWC’s content-related labels corresponded more strongly to humans than those of the classifier. Moreover, all approaches were similarly accurate in predicting the relationship goal.- Anthology ID:
- D19-5512
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Hong Kong, China
- Editors:
- Wei Xu, Alan Ritter, Tim Baldwin, Afshin Rahimi
- Venue:
- WNUT
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 94–100
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/D19-5512
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/D19-5512
- Cite (ACL):
- Chris van der Lee, Tess van der Zanden, Emiel Krahmer, Maria Mos, and Alexander Schouten. 2019. Automatic identification of writers’ intentions: Comparing different methods for predicting relationship goals in online dating profile texts. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019), pages 94–100, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Automatic identification of writers’ intentions: Comparing different methods for predicting relationship goals in online dating profile texts (van der Lee et al., WNUT 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/D19-5512.pdf