  Many people aim for change, but not everyone succeeds. While there are a
number of social psychology theories that propose motivation-related
characteristics of those who persist with change, few computational studies
have explored the motivational stage of personal change. In this paper, we
investigate a new dataset consisting of the writings of people who manifest
intention to change, some of whom persist while others do not. Using a variety
of linguistic analysis techniques, we first examine the writing patterns that
distinguish the two groups of people. Persistent people tend to reference more
topics related to long-term self-improvement and use a more complicated writing
style. Drawing on these consistent differences, we build a classifier that can
reliably identify the people more likely to persist, based on their language.
Our experiments provide new insights into the motivation-related behavior of
people who persist with their intention to change.
