Emerging Trends in Personality Identification Using Online Social Networks—A Literature Survey

Abstract

Personality is a combination of all the attributes—behavioral, temperamental, emotional, and mental—that characterizes a unique individual. Ability to identify personalities of people has always been of great interest to the researchers due to its importance. It continues to find highly useful applications in many domains. Owing to the increasing popularity of online social networks, researchers have started looking into the possibility of predicting a user's personality from his online social networking profile, which serves as a rich source of textual as well as non-textual content published by users. In the process of creating social networking profiles, users reveal a lot about themselves both in what they share and how they say it. Studies suggest that the online social networking websites are, in fact, a relevant and valid means of communicating personality. In this article, we review these various studies reported in literature toward identification of personality using online social networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported survey of its kind at the time of submission. We hope that our contribution, especially in summarizing the previous findings and in identifying the directions for future research in this area, would encourage researchers to do more work in this budding area.