#mygoal: Finding Motivations on Twitter
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014)
Abstract
Our everyday language reflects our psychological and cognitive state and effects the states of other individuals. In this contribution we look at the intersection between motivational state and language. We create a set of hashtags, which are annotated for the degree to which they are used by individuals to mark-up language that is indicative of a collection of factors that interact with an individual’s motivational state. We look for tags that reflect a goal mention, reward, or a perception of control. Finally, we present results for a language-model based classifier which is able to predict the presence of one of these factors in a tweet with between 69% and 80% accuracy on a balanced testing set. Our approach suggests that hashtags can be used to understand, not just the language of topics, but the deeper psychological and social meaning of a tweet.