Deep Learning Reveals New Insights About People Posted on : Sep 22 - 2017

Can a computer detect an author’s personality type, based only on a sample of his or her writing? Four researchers from Singapore and Mexico City sought to answer that question

In their newly published study, the authors present a deep learning-based method that can figure out the psychological profiles of authors. They used a specially designed deep convolutional neural network. Their method analyzed various texts in order to identify the presence or absence of the Big Five personality traits. The full paper can be found in IEEE Intelligent Systems, a peer-reviewed academic journal.

This personality detection study signifies the vast potential of deep learning. With AI technology, people are looking to the future, but increasingly, machine learning is allowing us to look inwards, as well. Advanced pattern recognition is illuminating aspects of human behavior. Deep learning, in particular, has become an AI buzzword, with applications ranging from medical diagnostics to market research.

 “Deep learning is a set of techniques that allow computers to solve a certain class of problems, such as automatically tagging the contents of pictures, or transcribing speech into text,” said François Chollet, a deep learning researcher at Google, when asked to explain this facet of machine learning.

 “What’s special about deep learning is that it allows the computer to automatically discover rules to follow to solve a problem, through exposure to training examples, instead of having human programmers explicitly specify the rules,” he said.

The recently published deep learning study presented the researchers with unique challenges. Personality detection was a difficult classification task, partly due to the ambiguity of natural language, according to Erik Cambria, a co-author of the study and assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University. View More