Acknowledgments.- Introduction: From ThePrincess Bride to computational personality.- Personality in a nutshell: Understanding who we are.- Computational personality analysis: When the machine meets the psychologist.- Distributional semantics and personality: How to find a perpetrator in a haystack.- Themes of personality: Profiling a political leader.- Going beyond words: How the Sisters of Mercy may identify psychopaths.- Hidden textual themes: Into Shakespeare’s mind.- The complexity of personality: From Snowden to Superman.- Attractors of personality: A murderer, a terrorist and some angry Jews.- Taking complexity a step forward: The reversibility of the pedophile’s mind.- Discussion.- Appendix.- Author index.- Subject index.
Yair Neuman (b. 1968) is Full Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brain Sciences Foundation, a co-director of the Behavioral Insights Research Lab at U. Toronto and affiliated with many other organizations. He received his BA in Psychology (Major) and Philosophy (Minor) and his PhD in Cognition (Hebrew Univ. 1999) and his expertise is in interdisciplinary research where he draws on diverse disciplines to address problems from an unique perspective. He was the chief algorithm developer of the IARPA metaphor project (ADAMA group).
Prof. Neuman has published extensively in leading journals and in various disciplines such as Natural Language Processing, Semiotics, Psychology and Mathematical Modeling. In a previous book of his, he proposed a new approach to cultural psychology. Computational Personality Analysis is the fifth book of Professor Neuman's.
The emergence of intelligent technologies, sophisticated natural language processing methodologies and huge textual repositories, invites a new approach for the challenge of automatically identifying personality dimensions through the analysis of textual data. This short book aims to (1) introduce the challenge of computational personality analysis, (2) present a unique approach to personality analysis and (3) illustrate this approach through case studies and worked-out examples.
This book is of special relevance to psychologists, especially those interested in the new insights offered by new computational and data-intensive tools, and to computational social scientists interested in human personality and language processing.