Identification of Author Personality Traits using Stylistic Features: Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2015

Author profiling is the task of determining the age, gender or type of the author's personality by studying their sociolect aspect, that is, how the language is shared by people. This paper presents the COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore entry for the PAN 2015 competition on Author Profiling task. Our proposed system is based on stylometry features. We implemented 29 different stylistic features, many of which are language independent. Since the training data was available in multiple languages, one of our main objectives was to explore which language independent features are most effective. The problem of author profiling was casted as a supervised document classification task. Results showed that features (Percentage of Question Sentences, Average Sentence Length, Percentage of Punctuations, Percentage of Comma and Percentage of Full stops) were most effective multilingual features.