Matching LIWC with Russian Thesauri: An Exploratory Study

In Author Profiling research, there is a growing interest in lexical resources providing various psychologically meaningful word categories. One of such instruments is Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, which was compiled manually in English and translated into many other languages. We argue that the resource contains a lot of subjectivity, which is further increased in the translation process. As a result, the translated lexical resource is not linguistically transparent. In order to address this issue, we translate the resource from English to Russian semi-automatically, analyze the translation in terms of agreement and match the resulting translation with two Russian linguistic thesauri. One of the thesauri is chosen as a better match for the psychologically meaningful categories in question. We further apply the linguistic thesaurus to analyze the psychologically meaningful word categories in two Author Profiling tasks based on Russian texts. Our results indicate that linguistically-motivated thesauri not only provide objective and linguistically motivated content, but also result in significant correlates of certain psychological states, replicating evidence obtained with hand-crafted lexical resources.