Using the Personality Insights Service in IBM Watson

by Stas TurloJuly 5, 2016

In this post, we show how to extract, analyze, and visualize a spectrum of personality attributes from Reddit and Stack Overflow answers/questions.

IBM Watson Personality Insight is one of the services for text analysis available within IBM Bluemix. Learn how to start working with using Personality Sunburst Chart for visualization.

Table of Contents

Prerequisites

To get started, you need:

an IBM Bluemix account
the Cloud Foundry CLI

How it works

The Personality Insights service makes use of recent studies in the fields of psychology and psycholinguistics. Relying on data analytics algorithms, the models—trained and calibrated by IBM—infer personality characteristics based on textual information:

Big Five represent the most widely used model for generally describing how a person engages with the world.
Needs describe which aspects of a product will resonate with a person.
Values describe motivating factors that influence a person’s decision making.

For more details, refer to this IBM Watson documentation.

Our demo app can use either the Stack Exchange API (via Stack-on-Go) or Reddit user comments RSS feed (via SlyMarbo/rss) to collect input data for Personality Insights. To make requests to Personality Insights, we use the Go SDK for IBM Watson services. To visualize responses from the service, Personality Sunburst Chart is used. Below, you will find a sample result of the output.

Trying it yourself

The source code for the article is available in our GitHub repo. You can click this link to deploy a demo app to your Bluemix account or use the following steps to deploy it manually:

Clone a repository: git clone https://github.com/Altoros/personality-insights-demo
Go to the repository directory: cd personality-insights-demo
Create an application: cf push APP_NAME
Create a Personality Insight service instance: cf create-service personality_insights tiered personality-insight-svc
Bind the service instance to your application: cf bind-service YOUR_APP_NAME personality-insight-svc
Restage your application: cf restage APP_NAME

Alternatively, you can create and bind the service instance using the Bluemix dashboard UI.

The binding procces is simple.

As you can see, with the Personality Insight service, it is really easy to extract and analyze a spectrum of attributes to discover actionable insights about human personalities.

Stas Turlo is a software engineer at Altoros. He has 10+ years of experience in reverse engineering, object-oriented programming, cloud computing, and data analysis. His expertise includes reconstructing algorithms, file formats, and structures of binary data. Using Golang and Ruby as his primary tools, Stas is also proficient in Python, C / C++, and C#. You can find Stas on GitHub.