Divergent word usages reflect differences among people. In this paper, we present a novel angle for studying word usage divergence -- word interpretations. We propose an approach that quantifies semantic differences in interpretations among different groups of people. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by quantitative evaluations. Experiment results indicate that divergences in word interpretations exist. We further apply the approach to two well studied types of differences between people -- gender and region. The detected words with divergent interpretations reveal the unique features of specific groups of people. For gender, we discover that certain different interests, social attitudes, and characters between males and females are reflected in their divergent interpretations of many words. For region, we find that specific interpretations of certain words reveal the geographical and cultural features of different regions.
Much work has focused on divergent word usages among people in numerous aspects, such as gender, age, occupation, and region. It is reported that typical male language uses more judgmental adjectives, elliptical sentences, directives, and I'' reference, while typical female language contains more intensive adverbs, references to emotions, uncertainty verbs @cite_9 . People in different age groups appear to choose words differently. reported that, comparing with younger people, older people talk more about family and work, and use less swear words in their language @cite_0 . Jobs affect the language patterns of people as well @cite_10 . In the paper, the authors listed the most used words of several occupations, and their results indicate clear divergences in word usages between people of different jobs. Similarly, different cities may have different preferences in words @cite_13 , which reflect regional differences between people.
@cite_0 @cite_9 @cite_10 @cite_13
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We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ with ‘husband’ or 'boyfriend’). To date, this represents the largest study, by an order of magnitude, of language and personality. Abstract Groups of 32 children in each of three grades (kindergarten, second, and fourth) listened to a man's voice and a woman's voice, speaking words simultaneously. On one run through the 23 pairs of words, Ss were instructed to report what the man's voice was saying; on another, the words spoken by the woman. The stimulus words were systematically varied with respect to the number of syllables they contained. For cach S, the stimulus words were presented on one occasion binaurally (both words in both cars), on another occasion, dichotically (two different words in each ear). The number of correct reports of the word spoken by the desired voice increased with age; the number of intrusive errors (reports of words spoken by the unwanted voice) declined with age. At all age levels, scores were higher under dichotic presentation, but there was no change with age in the advantage derived from this presentation. Children at each age level made more errors on single-syllable than on multi-syllable words, but this difference was greater for older children. An analysis of errors revealed systematic differences among age groups in the nature of wrong guesses. Performanec improved through blocks of trials, at all age levels. Two projects explored the links between language use and aging. In the first project, written or spoken text samples from disclosure studies from over 3,000 research participants from 45 different studies representing 21 laboratories in 3 countries were analyzed to determine how people change in their use of 14 text dimensions as a function of age. A separate project analyzed the collected works of 10 well-known novelists, playwrights, and poets who lived over the last 500 years. Both projects found that with increasing age, individuals use more positive and fewer negative affect words, use fewer self-references, use more future-tense and fewer past-tense verbs, arid demonstrate a general pattern of increasing cognitive complexity. Implications for using language as a marker of personality among current and historical texts are discussed. The language used in tweets from 1,300 different US counties was found to be predictive of the subjective well-being of people living in those counties as measured by representative surveys. Topics, sets of co-occurring words derived from the tweets using LDA, improved accuracy in predicting life satisfaction over and above standard demographic and socio-economic controls (age, gender, ethnicity, income, and education). The LDA topics provide a greater behavioural and conceptual resolution into life satisfaction than the broad socio-economic and demographic variables. For example, tied in with the psychological literature, words relating to outdoor activities, spiritual meaning, exercise, and good jobs correlate with increased life satisfaction, while words signifying disengagement like ’bored’ and ’tired’ show a negative association.