A.I Astrology

Predicting Social Characteristics of Famous People using Natural Language Processing

Zodiac, Watson & NLP

Recently there have been staggering amounts of breakthroughs in the field of natural language processing (NLP). There is a sense of excitement with in the Machine Learning community, with grandiose sounding concepts like “universal language” and “true language understanding” making the rounds.

IBM has invested heavily in NLP. Its NLP group, called IBM Watson™, is maybe best known for teaching machines to play Jeopardy. These efforts are packaged in powerful, but mostly closed blackbox APIs. One of these APIs is particularly interesting to experiment with:

The IBM Watson™ Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generated. It enables us to infer personality characteristics, including Big Five, Needs and Values. The results are amazingly accurate at times. Nevertheless, it reminds one of Astrology.

The Experiment

For this experiment I decided to apply the IBM Watson™ Personality Insights API to text written by famous people from different backgrounds and see how it defines their personalities. Here is a selection of results:

Martin Luther King, Jr.

You are analytical and rational.

You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are self-controlled: you have control over your desires, which are not particularly intense. And you are confident: you are hard to embarrass and are self-confident most of the time. Your choices are driven by a desire for prestige.

You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done.

Joseph Stalin

You are heartfelt and confident.

You are confident: you are hard to embarrass and are self-confident most of the time. You are calm under pressure: you handle unexpected events calmly and effectively. And you are laid-back: you appreciate a relaxed pace in life.

Your choices are driven by a desire for prestige.

You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done.

Michael Jackson

You are social, generous and rational.

You are respectful of authority: you prefer following with tradition in order to maintain a sense of stability. You are laid-back: you appreciate a relaxed pace in life. And you are confident: you are hard to embarrass and are self-confident most of the time.

You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of discovery. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You are relatively unconcerned with achieving success: you make decisions with little regard for how they show off your talents.

Queen Elizabeth II

You are social and unpretentious.

You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are confident: you are hard to embarrass and are self-confident most of the time. And you are sociable: you enjoy being in the company of others. Your choices are driven by a desire for connectedness.

You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You are relatively unconcerned with achieving success: you make decisions with little regard for how they show off your talents.

Mahatma Gandhi

You are a bit compulsive, somewhat critical and shrewd.

You are unconcerned with art: you are less concerned with artistic or creative activities than most people who participated in our surveys. You are laid-back: you appreciate a relaxed pace in life. And you are intermittent: you have a hard time sticking with difficult tasks for a long period of time.

Your choices are driven by a desire for well-being. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done.

George W. Bush

You are expressive and genial.

You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are confident: you are hard to embarrass and are self-confident most of the time. And you are outgoing: you make friends easily and feel comfortable around other people. Your choices are driven by a desire for prestige.

You consider both independence and helping others to guide a large part of what you do. You like to set your own goals to decide how to best achieve them. And you think it is important to take care of the people around you.

Mother Teresa

You are social, somewhat dependent and can be perceived as shortsighted.

You are sociable: you enjoy being in the company of others. You are outgoing: you make friends easily and feel comfortable around other people. And you are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. Your choices are driven by a desire for connectedness.

You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You are relatively unconcerned with achieving success: you make decisions with little regard for how they show off your talents.

Similarity Analysis

by Roelof Pieters

Roelof took the experiment even further, by calculating the similarity scores between the famous peoples analysis's. Super fun results, which you can reproduce with this IPython notebook. Here are some results from it:

[[0.94942288365034311, 'George W. Bush & Queen Elizabeth II'],

[0.9493873507343713, 'Joseph Stalin & George W. Bush'],

[0.91523458083344456, 'Mother Teresa & Queen Elizabeth II'],

[0.892545881081097, 'Martin Luther King, Jr. & Joseph Stalin'],

[0.88445803693395175, 'George W. Bush & Mahatma Gandhi'],

[0.87867547015608727, 'Joseph Stalin & Queen Elizabeth II'],

[0.86383755142426899, 'Joseph Stalin & Mahatma Gandhi'],

[0.84691708980805991, 'Martin Luther King, Jr. & George W. Bush'],

[0.84324758850382342, 'Michael Jackson & Queen Elizabeth II'],

[0.83321318339328831, 'Mahatma Gandhi & Queen Elizabeth II'],

[0.82488754147154886, 'Michael Jackson & Mother Teresa'],

[0.82263787471377381, 'Michael Jackson & George W. Bush'],

[0.81601923568675849, 'Mother Teresa & George W. Bush'],

[0.80737760078726017, 'Michael Jackson & Martin Luther King, Jr.'],

[0.79250117966636857, 'Michael Jackson & Joseph Stalin'],

[0.77866167715262624, 'Martin Luther King, Jr. & Queen Elizabeth II'],

[0.74651208579179085, 'Martin Luther King, Jr. & Mahatma Gandhi'],

[0.74159037086261692, 'Mother Teresa & Mahatma Gandhi'],

[0.69651728861455853, 'Joseph Stalin & Mother Teresa'],

[0.66617327362851575, 'Michael Jackson & Mahatma Gandhi'],

[0.65807277350069748, 'Martin Luther King, Jr. & Mother Teresa']]

Make your own conclusions but Bush and Queen Elizabeth, as well as Bush and Stalin as the top 2 most similar "Personalities". Then again, there's a great level of arbitrariness to these sorts of services, as with Martn Luther King and Mother Teresa being the "least" similar. - Roelof

Final thoughts

This experiment illustrates the performance of state-of-art personality analysis systems. One can imagine applications for such systems ranging from Job-Applications analysis to social group assessments by the NSA.

All results are reproducible by using the convenient Web Interface, provided by IBM Watson™. Further more the API enables developers to integrate these features into their own apps with great ease. #ComputationalComedy