BREXIT: Psychometric Profiling the Political Salubrious Through Machine Learning: Predicting personality traits of Boris Johnson through Twitter political text

Authors

James UsherFollow
Pierpaolo Dondio

Document Type

Conference Paper

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

1.2 COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, Computer Sciences, Political science

Publication Details

WIMS 2020: The 10th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics Biarritz France 30 June 2020- 3 July 2020.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3405962.3405981

Abstract

Whilst the CIA have been using psychometric profiling for decades, Cambridge Analytica showed that people's psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook or Twitter accounts. To exploit this form of psychological assessment from digital footprints, we propose machine learning methods for assessing political personality from Twitter. We have extracted the tweet content of Prime Minster Boris Johnson’s Twitter account and built three predictive personality models based on his Twitter political content. We use a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural network, a Naive Bayes multinomial model and a Support Machine Vector model to predict the OCEAN model which consists of the Big Five personality factors from a sample of 3355 political tweets. The approach vectorizes political tweets, then it learns word vector representations as embeddings from spaCy that are then used to feed a supervised learner classifier. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by measuring the quality of the predictions for each trait per model from a classification algorithm. Our findings show that all three models compute the personality trait “Openness” with the Support Machine Vector model achieving the highest accuracy. “Extraversion” achieved the second highest accuracy personality score by the Multi-Layer Perceptron neural network and Support Machine Vector model.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1145/3405962.3405981

Recommended Citation

Usher, James and Dondio, Pierpaolo, "BREXIT: Psychometric Profiling the Political Salubrious Through Machine Learning: Predicting personality traits of Boris Johnson through Twitter political text" (2020). Conference papers. 398.
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/scschcomcon/398

Funder

No funding was received for this work.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.