Picking the Amateur's Mind - Predicting Chess Player Strength from Game Annotations

Results from psychology show a connection between a speaker’s expertise in a task and the language he uses to talk about it. In this paper, we present an empirical study on using linguistic evidence to predict the expertise of a speaker in a task: playing chess. Instructional chess literature claims that the mindsets of amateur and expert players differ fundamentally (Silman, 1999); psychological science has empirically arrived at similar...