[Air-l] personal homepages

Rowin A Cross rowin.cross at strath.ac.uk
Thu Nov 27 04:51:35 PST 2003


Hello Frank,
Thanks for the reference, I guess I didn't think the Dutch factor
through properly!

Best wishes,
Rowin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: air-l-admin at aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin at aoir.org] On 
> Behalf Of Frank Schaap
> Sent: 27 November 2003 11:53
> To: air-l at aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-l] personal homepages
> 
> 
> Rowin A Cross wrote:
> > By content, do you mean subject matter rather than 
> linguistic factors 
> > -
> > as discussed briefly at 
> > http://www.nature.com/nsu/nsu_pf/030714/030714-13.html?  It 
> would be 
> > interesting to compare 'apparent' gender as implied by content with 
> > linguistic gender (for want of a better expression), given the 
> > discussions earlier on this list about hiding or creating 
> identities 
> > online.
> 
> This research has been implemented in the online Gender Genie, at:
> 
http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html

You can feed it text and with ~70% correctness it will tell you the
gender of the author of the text. I fed it 3 of my own texts and it
miss-assigned one, while correctly guessing my gender from the other 2.

However, it only does this with English texts. I recon the general gist
of the algoritm could be translated, but you probably need to do a lot
of work to actually make it work for other languages, as language is
such a intricate instrument. I'm not an expert on this algoritm, but I
guess it's out for the moment for analyzing Dutch websites.

So, I actually relied on my own cultural and linguistic understandings
of what makes Dutch masculinity and femininity, "reading" both subject
matter and linguistic patterns, although it must be said, I did so very
loosely and intuitively.


Frank.

PS this reply is given 189 feminine and 191 masculine points by the
Gender 
Genie, barely giving me a pass on my gender ;)


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