Analyzing the NYT OpEd article with IBM Watson Personality Insights
The anonymous article published in New York Times “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” is in the current news. While I have no interest in the political aspects of the story, my curiosity is around how natural language processing systems such as IBM Watson would interpret the personality of the individual who has penned the article. This is just a fun exercise on a week end and has to be taken that way as you read the blog.
This is my personal blog and has not been approved by my employer and I am using publicly available demo that anyone can try.
I collected the text from the New York Times Article for this analysis. The demo analysis used the text to perform natural language processing to get insights into how and why people think, act, and feel the way they do. The service applies linguistic analytics and personality theory to infer attributes from a person’s unstructured text.
The accuracy depends on how big the size of the text is but this particular article is about 957 words and may not be fully sufficient to depict the full picture of the personality. However, I wanted to see if it can provide a glimpse of the main traits based on the linguistic analysis.
The following is the summary that IBM Watson Personality Insights provided.
The highlights are that the individual is analytical, critical, philosophical, likes new ideas, empathetic and compassionate to others. Additional details are provided below. Some of the things like references to automobiles have to be taken with a grain of salt.

The key attributes about personality and values based on the analysis is below. Seems like the individual is open and highly emotional.

The following provides the visualization across many dimensions. Some of the highlights with a higher weightage are Intellect, Cautiousness, Authority-Challenging, Artistic Interests, Dutifulness, Self-Efficacy, Assertiveness, Altruism, Sympathy. The other attributes and their relative weightage can be seen from the chart.

This was a fun exercise that took about 5 minutes to get this information. I have no idea how close this is to the truth or how far is it from it. It will be interesting to see how it matches up if at all the individual becomes public.
Hope you enjoyed reading as much as I did playing with the demo. Amazing how in certain situations technology could be made part of. If curious to analyze your own articles feel free to try https://personality-insights-demo.ng.bluemix.net/
Regards
Srinivas
