PsyPath: Psychologically-guided Self-Exploration for Personality Detection

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission3759 Authors

Keywords: Personality Detection, Large Language Models, Monte Carlo Tree Search, Interpretability, Computational Psychology

Abstract:

Personality detection aims to label an individual's traits via identifying linguistic cues from his or her written text.
Previous approaches typically perform a direct mapping between text and trait labels or apply static reasoning to this task.

In this paper, we argue that dynamic reasoning, underpinned by psychological theory, is essential for personality trait inference.
To address this, we propose PsyPath, a novel framework that models personality detection as a process of psychologically-guided self-exploration. By enabling large language models (LLMs) to dynamically generate and answer psychologically meaningful questions,
our method creates a dynamic reasoning path to explore the underlying dimensions of personality traits.
This mechanism not only makes the reasoning process transparent, but also helps the model understand personality nuances in a way that mirrors expert psychological reasoning.

For the "guided self-exploration", we propose a novel hybrid scoring mechanism to step-by-step evaluate the generated nodes in the reasoning paths that balances psychological coherence (black-box scoring) and model output dynamics (white-box scoring).
This reasoning-based formulation inherently reflects how psychologists assess personality, as they rely on iterative, diagnostic reasoning.
Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that PsyPath consistently outperforms strong baselines,
yielding improvements in predictive accuracy and model interpretability.

Moreover, the generated reasoning paths provide psychologically meaningful training data, significantly improving performance and psychologically grounded interpretability in downstream tasks.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Hierarchical Structure Prediction, Syntax, and Parsing

Research Area Keywords: NLP Applications,Language Modeling,Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 3759