Text Use in Online Dating Profiles

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Text Use in Online Dating Profiles

• James Fung Christo Sims
• ANLP Final Presentation
• Instructor Marti Hearst
• 12.04.06

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Overview
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• Goal
• An exploratory exercise can we use the text
  someone provides in their dating profile to
  assign them to various classes?

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• The Text
• Can't wait to get to know you
• Nice, warm and sweet, as most of my friends
  would describe me. I love to laugh all the time.
  I have a strong passion towards life even through
  little things. I tend to be quiet in a large
  group but generally great with one on one basis.
  I am ambitious about love and romance. And I am
  very respectful of the needs and wants of other
  people. Life is a beautiful journey. I am seeking
  someone who would appreciate the value of life,
  family, have a warm heart and nice peronality to
  share this journey with. If you are that person,
  I can't wait to get to know you.

(female, asian, college grad)
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Possible Classes

• Education
• Gender
• Attend Services
• Income
• Ethnicity
• Marital Status
• Want kids
• Others
• Astrology?

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Approach
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Scraping Profiles

• Yahoo! Personals
• 200 Male seeking Female
• 200 Female seeking Male
• Within 50 Miles of San Francisco
• Ages 25-35

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Feature Extraction (Python)

• Token frequency
• Words TF, TF.IDF
• Bigrams
• Weighted headlines
• Readability measures
• Characters, syllables, words, complex words,
  sentences
• Ratios of the above
• Gunning-Fog and six others

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Feature Selection Classification (Weka)

• Use Wekas built in feature selection tools
• Chi-Squared, Information Gain
• Subset Eval (not working well with most of the
  classes)
• Explore a variety of classification algorithms,
  for a variety of possible classes
• Multinomial Naïve Bayes
• K-Nearest Neighbors
• Decision Tree
• Support Vector Machines

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Preliminary Results
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Preliminary Results

• Able to beat a naïve baseline in a few cases,
  usually where there are only two or three
  possible classification categories
• Gender 69 Accuracy
• Category Instances
• Women seeking a man 196
• Man seeking a woman 200 (51)
• Want (more) kids 65 Accuracy
• Category Instances
• Yes 202 (62.3)
• Not sure 105
• No 17

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Preliminary Results

• More difficult with more classification
  categories
• Education 47.4 Accuracy
• Category Instances
• Post-Graduate 94
• College Grad 175 (44)
• Some College 86
• High School Grad 13
• Some High School 3
• Income (61 null reply)
• Employment Status (75 Full-time)
• Political Views
• Attend Services
• Ethnicity

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Preliminary Results (cont.)

• Some interesting statistics about feature
  probability for a given class (from multinomial
  Bayes output)
• Gender
• man - over 2x as likely in womens profile
• sense - over 2x as likely in womans profile
• honest - over 2x as likely in female profile
• independent - over 3x as likely in female
  profile
• loving - over 3x as likely in female profile
• crazy - over 4x as likely in male profile
• company - over 3x as likely in male profile
• friendship - over 2x as likely in female
  profile
• me laugh - almost 4x as likely in female
  profile
• great sense - over 6x as likely in female
  profile

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Preliminary Results (cont.)

• Some interesting statistics about features (from
  multinomial bayes)
• Want (more) kids
• caring - over 3x as likely in the yes than
  the not sure class
• heart - over 2x as likely in the yes than the
  not sure class
• sometimes - over 2x as likely in the not sure
  than the yes class
• beautiful - 2x as likely in yes than not
  sure
• real - 2x as likely in not sure than yes
• dancing - 2x as likely in the not sure than
  yes class
• games - almost 2x as likely in the not sure
  than yes class

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Challenges
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Not Enough Instances

• For most classes, we dont have enough instances
  for meaningful training
• Education
• Some College 87
• College Grad 176
• Post-Graduate 97
• High School Grad 14
• Some High School 3
• Ethnicity
• Hispanic/Latino 33
• Caucasian (white) 202
• Asian 74
• Inter-racial 14
• African American (black) 38
• Other 13
• Pacific Islander 7
• Native American 1
• East Indian 8

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Features Arent Working

• Weka identifies few relevant features
• Subset Eval selects subsets of size 1-3
• Difficult to overcome strong a priori
  probability

PG CG SC HSG SHS
Post-Graduate 0 94 0 0 0
College Grad 0 175 0 0 0
Some College 0 86 0 0 0
High School Grad 0 12 0 0 1
Some High School 0 2 0 0 1
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Additional Challenges

• I am 33old woman from Ireland living here for a
  few years Love this country and love the out
  doors, favourite thing is mountain biking and
  hiking tooSan Francisco has so much to offer,
  nice restaurants which i love Thai food and so
  many live music shows which i love to out and
  listen every month

No punctuation
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Additional Challenges (cont.)

• I am into swimming, sunrises, Vinyasa Yoga at
  the Loft, cafes, people watching, warm drinks in
  the morning, laughing, crying, feeling all of it,
  freshly squeezed juice, tennis, painting,
  spirals, Abraham Hicks, Life as Art, singing,
  swinging, sushi, backgammon, remembering my
  dreams, warm weather, soft textures, calligraphy,
  episopalian upbringing gone buddhist tendencies,
  handmade paper, dancing, fire, telling stories

Lists, not sentences
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Additional Challenges (cont.)

• I work alot but in my free time i love to play a
  round of golf and spend time out with my dog. I
  love going to the beach with him or going to the
  park and just chillin out. At night i love goin
  out with friend and having a few drinks.

Lack of complex words
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Additional Challenges

• Scraping profiles requires a user login
• Easy in PHP, not in Python
• Have to save profiles by hand, limits corpus size
• The profile text in Yahoo! Personals doesnt seem
  as thoughtful as profiles on Match.com
• Shorter profile text
• Spam?
• How dedicated are the participants?

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Where were headed
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Future Work (cont.)

• Need more profiles!
• PHP
• manually saved
• Different features
• Use of capitalization emphasis, grammar
• Tailored features
• More token features
• I go to church I am very sincere in my faith
  and my striving to become more Like Jesus. By
  know means am I perfect, however, NEW MERCIES
  EVERYDAY! I am a very real and straight forward
  person, however,HUMBLE to God's word and voice in
  my life. Always looking to HIM for my direction
  and HE is my SOURCE