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Linguists Out Men Impersonating Women On Twitter
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."
I hope that extra 15% certainty didn't cost millions in research grants; as a blind guess has 50% chance of being right.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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.
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.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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...
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...
#DeleteChrome
From the paper, in their data set 47.7% of tweets were from females, 32.8% were from males, and the rest was unspecified. Tossing out the unspecified ones, guessing "female" all the time would then give ~59% accuracy. On the surface that makes the 65.9% figure in the summary very lackluster, though better figures are reported with more information elsewhere in the article.
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.
True. But there are people who are good at identifying those situations where the gender doesn't match the behavior. In real life, its called 'gaydar'. On line, it could just be a phony picture and a poser.
The gender-behavior mismatch is evident (I've been told) from the writing of the subjects in question. Not just the choice of words or little hearts where the periods should be, but based on the style of writing and subject matter. Apparently, a transcript of a conversation (or series of e-mails) between individuals produces a more accurate determination than an essay.
Yes, humans widely use language differently based on their own subcultures. Women particularly in some cultures speak an entirely different language from the gender-neutral language spoken by everyone. In some languages such as Japanese gendered language is extremely readily apparent, and when I was chatting on Japanese chatrooms, it was nice to be able to identify the gender of the speaker in one or two lines of text from them.
In much the same way, while we often are of the belief that men and women use language the same way in English, because it's not readily apparent, we do actually use language differently. Here is another interesting one: women use fewer contractions than men. Weird but oddly true.
All of this has less to do with "gaydar" than that every subculture speaks a slightly different dialect. Gay men have a selection of words that set them off, (I actually commented to a gay-rights group, where I was an "ally" of gay-rights, that they were using "fabulous" like... A LOT. And I was all, "um... do you REALLY want to be projecting the notion that this stereotype is valid and accurate? Because that is what you are doing.") and this does not mean that gay men talk like women. They actually talk differently and distinctly from women, but in this world of false dichotomies that we live in, we presume that if gay men don't talk the same way as straight men, then they must talk like women. But, in reality, this isn't actually correct.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
We use a FULL STOP. Cus when I tell that sentence to end it motherfucking does. Bitches.