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."
Let's hope that 15%... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope that extra 15% certainty didn't cost millions in research grants; as a blind guess has 50% chance of being right.
Well depends on how it increases (Score:4, Insightful)
A statistically significant amount of accurate based on a single, at most 140 character, statement is not a small thing, so long as it scales with more. If that means that with a few statements or a longer statement you get in to the high 90s then that would be quite interesting. If it is 65% right all the time, then yes it was rather a waste.
Re:Let's hope that 15%... (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems to me that there are more men than women posting on twitter, so guessing man on every tweet might yield a higher accuracy than this algorithm.
Re:Let's hope that 15%... (Score:4, Insightful)
oh, yea,
Recognizing gender 65.9% based on one tweet (Score:4, Insightful)
What was the gender distribution of the tweets this was tested against? If 65.9% of the tweets were from a male, the algorithm "return Gender.male;" will get the gender right 65.9% of the time...
Re:Well depends on how it increases (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder what the proportions are on tweets that are deliberately intending to be misleading. Getting a 65% hit rate on people who are attempting to deceive is much more impressive than 65% who aren't making any attempt to obfuscate their gender.
Gender Inequality (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The only reason for the deduction is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not entirely true I am afraid.
Several experiments were conducted in the 60s and 70s on children raised in gender neutral parenting conditions, that focused on toy choices.
The experiment was intended to show the impact of societal imperitives on children and gender identities and gender specific behaviors, using toy preferences as metric.
The result of the test STILL had little girls favoring dollies with bright colors, and boys favoring machines and soldier type toys, even when very carefully imposed gender neutrality parenting was in effect, even from very young ages.
This is somewhat reinforced by more modern research into the physiological differences between male and female nervous systems.
The idea that men and women might intrinsically focus more on different concepts (and thus, relate to their environments differently from each other, and as such, describe them differently in literature) is not really all that far-fetched.
It is simply politically incorrect to state that women might actually have a biological proclevity toward being the "Domestic" partner in relationships given the current political climate of our western post-sufferage societies.
Somehow, "Staying home, taking care of babies, and doing the chores all day." is seen as a degrading thing, while "Standing in an assembly line inserting part A into assembly B ad nauseum all day" is somehow seen in an idealized fashion as a kind of "Freedom"-- however sick that might be in reality not withstanding.
Now, if you want to complain about women being statistically paid less than men, I will strongly support your argument that it (the practice) is based on pure bull--- But the statement that men and women are innately gender neutral and get conditioned exclusively by stereotypes? that is not supported by behaviorists.
Gender stereotypes simply reinforce already existent behaviors, for better or for worse.