Just the Way You Chat: Linking Personality, Style and Recognizability in Chats

Text chatting represents a hybrid type of communication,
where textual information is delivered following turn-taking dynamics,
which characterize spoken interactions. It is interesting to understand
whether special interactional behavior can emerge in chats, similarly as
it does in face-to-face exchanges. In this work, we focus on the writing
style of individuals, analyzing how it can be recognized given a portion
of chat, and how personality comes into play in this scenario. Two interesting
facts do emerge: 1) some traits correlate significantly with some
characteristics of people's chatting style, captured by stylometric features;
2) some of such features are very effective in recognizing a person
among a gallery of diverse individuals. This seems to suggest that some
personality traits could lead people to chat with a particular style, which
turns out to be very recognizable. For example, motor impulsiveness gives
a significative (negative) correlation with the use of the suspension points
(. . . ), that is also one of the most discriminative characteristics in chats.
This and other relations emerge on a dataset on 45 subjects, monitored
for 3 months, whose personality traits have been analyzed through selfadministered
questionnaires. What turns out is that chatting seems to
be more than just typing.