Mining Crowdsourced First Impressions in Online Social Video

While multimedia and social computing research have used crowdsourcing techniques to annotate objects, actions, and scenes in social video sites like YouTube, little work has addressed the crowdsourcing of personal and social traits in online social video or social media content in general. In this paper, we address the problems of (1) crowdsourcing the annotation of first impressions of video bloggers (vloggers) personal and social traits in conversational YouTube videos, and (2) mining the impressions with the goal of modeling the interplay of different vlogger facets. First, we design a human annotation task to crowdsource impressions of vloggers that extends a tradition of studies of personality impressions with the addition of attractiveness and mood impressions. Second, we propose a probabilistic framework using Topic Models to discover prototypical impressions that are data driven, and that combine multiple facets of vloggers. Finally, we address the task of automatically predicting topic impressions using nonverbal and verbal content extracted from videos and comments. Our study of 442 YouTube vlogs and 2,210 annotations collected in Mechanical Turk supports recent literature showing the feasibility to crowdsource interpersonal human impression with comparable quality to what is reported in social psychology research, and provides insights on the interplay among human first impressions. We also show that topic models are useful to discover meaningful prototypical impressions that can be validated by humans, and that different topics can be predicted using different sources of information from vloggers’ nonverbal and verbal content, as well as comments from the audience.