Fine-Grained Temporal Orientation and its Relationship with Psycho-Demographic Correlates

Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2018, pages 663–674 New Orleans, Louisiana, June 1 - 6, 2018. c⃝2018 Association for Computational Linguistics Fine-grained Temporal Orientation and its Relationship with Psycho-demographic Correlates Sabyasachi Kamila1, Mohammed Hasanuzzaman2, Asif Ekbal1, Pushpak Bhattacharyya1 and Andy Way2 1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India 2ADAPT Centre, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland sabysachi.pcs16@iitp.ac.in Abstract Temporal orientation refers to an individual’s tendency to connect to the psychological con- cepts of past, present or future, and it af- fects personality, motivation, emotion, de- cision making and stress coping processes. The study of the social media users’ psycho- demographic attributes from the perspective of human temporal orientation can be of utmost interest and importance to the business and administrative decision makers as it can pro- vide an extra precious information for them to make informed decisions. In this paper, we propose a very first study to demonstrate the association between the sentiment view of the temporal orientation of the users and their dif- ferent psycho-demographic attributes by an- alyzing their tweets. We first create a tem- poral orientation classifier in a minimally su- pervised way which classifies each tweet of the users in one of the three temporal cate- gories, namely past, present, and future. deep Bi-directional Long Short Term MemoryA (BLSTM) is used for the tweet classification task. Our tweet classifier achieves an accuracy of 78.27% when tested on a manually created test set. We then determine the users’ overall temporal orientation based on their tweets on the social media. The sentiment is added to the tweets at the fine-grained level where each temporal tweet is given a sentiment with either of the positive, negative or neutral. Our exper- iment reveals that depending upon the senti- ment view of temporal orientation, a user’s at- tributes vary. We finally measure the correla- tion between the users’ sentiment view of tem- poral orientation and their different psycho- demographic factors using regression. 1 Introduction The rapid growth of social media data in recent years has encouraged different studies which only existed at the psychological level (theory or pure logic). Various attributes of users can be analyzed from the texts they write on the social media plat- form. The studies include age, gender prediction (Marquardt et al., 2014; Sap et al., 2014), psy- chological well being (Dodds et al., 2011; Choud- hury et al., 2013), and a host of other behavioural, psychological and medical phenomena (Kosinski et al., 2013). However, a few works exist which analyze these factors using socio-economic char- acteristics of the Twitter users. Time is generally defined by a dimension where the events are ordered from the past through the present into the future which includes duration and intervals. Major studies on time have been done for event detection (Ihler et al., 2006; Batal et al., 2012; Sakaki et al., 2013) which are mainly of the subjective consent. In contrast, temporal orien- tation of a user is defined by his/her tendency to emphasize past, …

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