  Research from a variety of fields including psychology and linguistics have
found correlations and patterns in personal attributes and behavior, but
efforts to understand the broader heterogeneity in human behavior have not yet
integrated these approaches and perspectives with a cohesive methodology. Here
we extract patterns in behavior and relate those patterns together in a
high-dimensional picture. We use dimension reduction to analyze word usage in
text data from the online discussion platform Reddit. We find that pronouns can
be used to characterize the space of the two most prominent dimensions that
capture the greatest differences in word usage, even though pronouns were not
included in the determination of those dimensions. These patterns overlap with
patterns of topics of discussion to reveal relationships between pronouns and
topics that can describe the user population. This analysis corroborates
findings from past research that have identified word use differences across
populations and synthesizes them relative to one another. We believe this is a
step toward understanding how differences between people are related to each
other.
