Automatically profiling the author of an anonymous text

TL;DR: How much can the authors discern about the author of a text simply by analyzing the text itself?

Abstract: ImagIne that you have been gIven an Important text of unknown authorship, and wish to know as much as possible about the unknown author (demographics, personality, cultural background, among others), just by analyzing the given text. This authorship profiling problem is of growing importance in the current global information environment– applications abound in forensics, security, and commercial settings. For example, authorship profiling can help police identify characteristics of the perpetrator of a crime when there are too few (or too many) specific suspects to consider. Similarly, large corporations may be interested in knowing what types of people like or dislike their products, based on analysis of blogs and online product reviews. The question we therefore ask is: How much can we discern about the author of a text simply by analyzing the text itself? It turns out that, with varying degrees of accuracy, we can say a great deal indeed. Unlike the problem of authorship attribution (determining the author of a text from a given candidate set) discussed recently in these pages by Li, Zheng, and Chen authorship profiling does not begin with a set of writing samples from known candidate authors. Instead, we exploit the sociolinguistic observation that different groups of people speaking or writing in a particular genre and in a particular language use that language differently. That is, they vary in how often they use certain words or syntactic constructions (in addition to variation in pronunciation or intonation, for example). The particular profile dimensions we consider here are author gender, age,8 native language7 and personality.10