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style checker

Part of the style checker's interfact

New software being developed in the UK could enable email users to portray themselves as aggressive, caring, insightful or any other personality they wished to create.

The 'personality style checker', which aims to help email writers project a personality of their own choosing, was developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, reports the Chemistry & Industry Magazine.

"Conventional style-checkers identify a single set of 'bad' expressions, and propose alternative 'good expressions'," say the developers. "In contrast, our style-checker knows that a particular word may be good for projecting one personality type, but bad for another."

The prototype of the personality style checker, developed by Jon Oberlander and Alastair Gill, includes three aspects of personality: tough minded, extrovert and emotional. The user is able to adjust each of these qualities from low through to high, and the program will check the user's written email and suggest changes in the text of the email to more closely match the personality the user wishes to convey.

The suggested replacements can be accepted or rejected, as with a conventional spell checker.

Oberlander and Gill developed the style checker from a database which was compiled from an online experiment (no longer running), involving samples of text written by real people. The database links particular language styles to personality styles.

This experiment showed that people with an extroverted personality are more informal - for example, they tend to use the term "hi", whereas introverts use "hello". Extroverts also use a relaxed social style which includes expressions such as "catch up" and "take care". They are also more confident and assertive, using terms such as "want", "able" and "need (to)", rather than "trying", "going (to)", which tend to be used by introverts.

Non-standard punctuations such as :-) and *sigh* are also very much a high extrovert behaviour, the developers say.

They add that the style checker could also help organisations to project a consistent personality, even when each letter or email was written by a different person.

Aspects of the technology have been patented while researchers continue to refine it and include more personality styles.

According to Australian researcher, Dr Gerard Goggin of the University of Queensland, who researches the cultural and social aspects of the Internet, the technology is an "interesting development" which has an advantage because it draws on a broad database of text samples.

However, he is dubious that it could be used by organisations to project a consistent personality or corporate identity.

"The issue with email is we're sending so many emails now we're not necessarily thinking about them," he told ABC Science Online. "To say we could have an automated prompt or something is great, but to lean on it too much and say we can then put a template over an individual style to get it to be more corporate is perhaps gilding the lily."

"By using this kind of device you can get people to think about what they are expressing through their email, what personality is coming through, but it may not be particularly useful in trying to get an overall corporate uniformity in the same way everyone uses company letterhead," he says. "The way we use language is a bit more subtle than that."

"It's difficult to get technological solutions to social problems," he says. Categories of personality types such as extrovert, for example, didn't necessarily hold up across cultures.

Tags: business-economics-and-finance, science-and-technology, information-technology