Linguists Out Men Impersonating Women On Twitter 350
Hugh Pickens writes "Remember when the Gay Girl in Damascus revealed himself as a middle-aged man from Georgia? On a platform like Twitter, which doesn't ask for much biographical information, it's easy (and fun!) to take on a fake persona but now linguistic researchers have developed an algorithm that can predict the gender of a tweeter based solely on the 140 characters they choose to tweet. The research is based on the idea that women use language differently than men. 'The mere fact of a tweet containing an exclamation mark or a smiley face meant that odds were a woman was tweeting, for instance,' reports David Zax. Other research corroborates these findings, finding that women tend to use emoticons, abbreviations, repeated letters and expressions of affection more than men and linguists have also developed a list of gender-skewed words used more often by women including love, ha-ha, cute, omg, yay, hahaha, happy, girl, hair, lol, hubby, and chocolate. Remarkably, even when only provided with one tweet, the program could correctly identify gender 65.9% of the time. (PDF). Depending on how successful the program is proven to be, it could be used for ad-targeting, or for socio-linguistic research."
Linguists Need to Visit a Starbucks Occasionally (Score:5, Funny)
The mere fact of a tweet containing an exclamation mark or a smiley face meant that odds were a woman was tweeting
or a Mac user.
Re:Who Knew! (Score:5, Funny)
The mere fact that you show emotion outs you. Real men only use periods and commas, AND TYPE IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE REAL MEN ARE ALWAYS SHOUTING.
Re:Well depends on how it increases (Score:5, Funny)
I go to my congressional office, take my shirt off, arrange my family photos in the background, and take a picture to send to them.
Re:Well depends on how it increases (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting stuff. I wrote the first revision of my best friend's profile for match.com (I'm a man, she's a woman) simply because she was just awful at putting her best foot forward. She tweaked it, but I wonder how that would have come out under such analysis.
;)
Noooo! She's not a lithe fifty year old target shooting yoga instructor, she's a MAN!
Re:Oh this ought to be good (Score:4, Funny)
It would also be fun to see what it would do with my lesbian friends, many of which are immense tomboys.
I guess I don't quite see what their weight has to do with anything...
Number 1 Clue (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who Knew! (Score:4, Funny)
We use a FULL STOP. Cus when I tell that sentence to end it motherfucking does. Bitches.