Towards a New Dimension for User Modeling: The Use of Sensory Vocabulary

One aspect of user preference, which is of high interest especially for the field of e-learning, concerns the mode of presenting information: What sensory system(s) should be addressed to make information interesting and easy to understand for the user? The answer might be found when looking at the user´s perceptual preferences. To test the user would be the most direct way - and the most annoying for the user. In our research, we investigate the use of sensory vocabulary in forum texts as a source of implicit information on the user. 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.