Supplementary file 1_From direct scoring to cue integration: big five prediction from spoken responses to a picture-based self-projection task.docx

Objective<p>Open-ended language tasks are increasingly used in personality assessment, but their psychometric value largely depends on two factors: the type of evidence a task elicits and how that evidence is represented before scoring.</p>Methods<p>In this study, we examined five spoken responses to a picture-based self-projection task collected from 374 participants during in-person workplace training sessions. Participants first completed the Big Five Inventory-2 questionnaire; the spoken task was administered approximately 1 day later, and responses were transcribed using a Whisper-based automatic speech recognition pipeline.

We compared four approaches applied to the same transcribed corpus: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (a lexical dictionary method), contextual semantic embeddings, holistic large language model (LLM) appraisal (holistic appraisal route; HAR), and hierarchical cue integration route (HCIR).</p>Results<p>The results were trait-specific: extraversion was the most recoverable domain across methods, whereas Openness was the least recoverable.