A new program can distinguish between male and female authors with 80% accuracy. The article explains that males usually write about inanimate objects while girls write more about relationships and people. That knowledge enabled them to use the pronouns to help determine the author’s gender.
I wonder how hard it would be to trick the test, since according to the study, men who write for women’s magazines tend to write like women. What does this mean for journalists? To tick off your friendly neighborhood sports writer, tell him the program said he writes like a girl.
Hmm, I wonder how it would classify Mel…
I’m picturing the movie Victor/Victoria now in my head. LOL
Despite my attempt to pull the wool over your eyes, I believe that most people assume I’m female when I write.
It would be interesting if they had a web-based version of this. We could all plug in blog entries and see what we got. I wonder if individual blog entries might return different results.
Crazy stuff. And it doesn’t even need to see your handwriting! I wonder, though, how much of the measured difference between the writing of men and women is innate and how much is due to cultural expectations ingrained in our society.
As a side note, it seems like the technique they used was about the same as the Bayesian spam filters that are all the rage these days. I’ll bet you could train one of them in the same way to replicate the experiment.
I was thinking the exact thing Meredith wrote. I’d like to think that I write fairly neutral, but I’m sure my snowblower posts would probably make the program seg-fault and spontaneously combust.
I was reading a book that made similar observations. It said that men like to talk about things and events (sports, politics, news, etc.), while women talked about people and their relationships, and their feelings about those relationships. I paid a bit more attention for a little while and noticed it in conversations as well, not just in writing.
That makes sense. Even though people probably spend more time thinking about what they write than what they say, it’s coming from the same noodle.
I just found the gender genie, an implementation of the algorithm to detect between male and female writing. I tested it with a few of Mel’s blog entries and it thought she was male once, female three times. However, it thought Levi, Jason and I were, for the most part, female. It’s currently getting about 60% wrong though, so the algorithm needs some tweaking.
Gender Genie
Supposedly it should be right 80% of the time, but the actual results from the Gender Genie show a 50-50 split between right and wrong.
Fun: Gender Genie
Well, according to The Gender Genie’s analysis of my last couple of posts, I’m female…. Hmm, unfortunately whilst I did spend last week with two lovely young women, I’m definitely male myself.