Gender identification on Twitter

Catherine Ikae and Jacques Savoy

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2022, vol. 73, issue 1, 58-69

Abstract: To determine the author of a text's gender, various feature types have been suggested (e.g., function words, n‐gram of letters, etc.) leading to a huge number of stylistic markers. To determine the target category, different machine learning models have been suggested (e.g., logistic regression, decision tree, k nearest‐neighbors, support vector machine, naïve Bayes, neural networks, and random forest). In this study, our first objective is to know whether or not the same model always proposes the best effectiveness when considering similar corpora under the same conditions. Thus, based on 7 CLEF‐PAN collections, this study analyzes the effectiveness of 10 different classifiers. Our second aim is to propose a 2‐stage feature selection to reduce the feature size to a few hundred terms without any significant change in the performance level compared to approaches using all the attributes (increase of around 5% after applying the proposed feature selection). Based on our experiments, neural network or random forest tend, on average, to produce the highest effectiveness. Moreover, empirical evidence indicates that reducing the feature set size to around 300 without penalizing the effectiveness is possible. Finally, based on such reduced feature sizes, an analysis reveals some of the specific terms that clearly discriminate between the 2 genders.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24541

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:73:y:2022:i:1:p:58-69

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=2330-1635

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().