How developments in natural language processing help us in understanding human behaviour

Abstract

The ways people use language can reveal clues to their emotions, social behaviours, thinking styles, cultures and the worlds around them. In the past two decades, research at the intersection of social psychology and computer science has been developing tools to analyse natural language from written or spoken text to better understand social processes and behaviour. The goal of this Review is to provide a brief overview of the methods and data currently being used and to discuss the underlying meaning of what language analyses can reveal in comparison with more traditional methodologies such as surveys or hand-scored language samples. Language reveals clues to human emotions, social behaviours, thinking styles and cultures. This Review provides a brief overview of computational methods to analyse natural language from written or spoken text as a new tool to investigate social processes and understand human behaviour.