Exploring the Use of Psycholinguistic Information in Author Profiling

Identifying profile characteristics of the author of a given text is the aim of the Author Profiling (AP) task. In this paper, we explore the use of two well known psycholinguistic dictionaries, the Linguistic Inquirer and Word Count and the General Inquirer, with the objective to capture relevant information for recognizing the age and gender of the author of a given text. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, we introduce the use of General Inquirer in the AP task. Secondly, we propose different text representations based on these dictionaries, which help to analyze their relevance and complementariness to accomplish author profiling. We experiment with benchmark corpora on AP. The obtained results are competitive with state-of-the-art, validating the usefulness of psycholinguistic information for recognizing profile attributes of authors.