Extracting knowledge about cognitive style

According to psycholinguistic research, any text contains a lot of implicit information about its writer. The Internet provides an incredible amount of text produced by users. The information potential of texts that can be directly linked to a user (which is especially the case for forum and blog posts) is not yet sufficiently examined. Natural language processing techniques are in some cases used for getting information on the user´s personality, moods, affects and sentiments, but not yet for getting information on the user´s cognitive style concerning sensory preference. This paper explores the potential of such an idea. Therefore, a corpus with more than 1.000.000 forum posts was analyzed for the occurrence of expressions that are directly linked to a sensory system. We found that users differ significantly in their use of sensory expressions and that most users have preferred patterns for the use of sensory expressions. Furthermore we found a correlation between the sensory vocabulary of a post and the sensory preference of the users who answered this post.