Measuring the Language of Self-Disclosure across Corpora
Being able to reliably estimate self-disclosure – a key component of friendship and intimacy – from language is important for many psychology studies. We build single-task models on five self-disclosure corpora, but find that these models generalize poorly; the within-domain accuracy of predicted message-level self-disclosure of the best-performing model (mean Pearson’s r=0.69) is much higher than the respective across data set accuracy (mean Pearson’s r=0.32), due to both variations in the corpora (e.g., medical vs. general topics) and labeling instructions (target variables: self-disclosure, emotional disclosure, intimacy). However, some lexical features, such as expression of negative emotions and use of first person personal pronouns such as ‘I’ reliably predict self-disclosure across corpora. We develop a multi-task model that yields better results, with an average Pearson’s r of 0.37 for out-of-corpora prediction.
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