What does your Facebook language reveal? A group of Penn researchers recently conducted the most extensive study on the insights embedded in our social media language.
700 million words, phrases, and topics, were culled from the Facebook profiles of 75,000 respondents. Unlike traditional studies that analyze a fixed list of words, this one employed an “open-vocabulary” approach, which identifies important terms from the open-ended language of the group. This method enabled researchers to successfully predict people’s personality, age, and gender based solely on how they talk on Facebook. The predictive models they created were staggeringly accurate; the gender of participants was properly identified 92% of the time.
Explore how words are used across different age groups with the study’s interactive tool.
(via "Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach")
