User's Social Media Profile as Predictor of Empathy

Abstract

The use of social media, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is nowadays very common and quite for sure each one of us has at least a digital profile on them. The information left of these platforms such as likes, posts, tweets and photos are very informative and can be used for deducting our preferences, tendencies and behaviors. The analysis of the social media footprints has become a relevant research topic in the last decade and many works have demonstrated how to extract some traits of the user's affective sphere. In this paper, we focus on the prediction of empathic tendencies of a subject as an index of the influence of emotions during decisional processes. This value can be included in the user profile and can be relevant in some scenarios, such as music and movie recommender systems, where the emotional component is strongly delineated. We propose an approach of empathy level prediction based on a linear regression algorithm over Facebook profiles. We use a word2vec representation of the textual contents of the user's time-line posts, a LDA and SVD vector representation of the user's likes and other general descriptive data. The evaluation performed has demonstrated the validity of the approach for predicting the empathy tendency and the results have showed some relevant correlations with some specific groups of user's descriptive features.