English is such a wonderfully imprecise language. The word personality seems to be used here as a synonym for "word-choice features we can extract from a text corpus".
If anyone thinks this gives useful predictors outside of the context of "what will they Tweet next?", I have a lovely bridge to sell you.
The assumption is that word-choice features correlate to personality traits. It's not such a crazy assumption. Of course nobody knows how strong the correlation is. Humans are messy and complex but also very predictable in many ways.
I'd hate to think my tweets like "Black Eyed Beauty #AddAWordRuinAMovie" would be used without context to build up a personality profile.
In general, this research doesn't seem much more sophisticated than building a personality profile off of a vocabulary pulled from a very small subset of language usage.
I was wondering similar things: does it still work if 80% of my tweetstream is me posting #overheardAtWork / #qooc quips? Because I'm going to guess no :P
how wrong could you be. Just because you can't see the correlations, or have no intuitive feeling for statistical correlation does not mean that there's isn't one. You'd be very surprised at how much predictive accuracy there is in "word-choice features we can extract from a text corpus"
If anyone thinks this gives useful predictors outside of the context of "what will they Tweet next?", I have a lovely bridge to sell you.