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Why Your Online Impersonation of a 16-year Old Girl Won't Last Long

Posted by timothy on from the because-soon-enough-you'll-be-17-anyhow dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Can computers pick up your age and gender from your tweets? If you want to give it a try, here's your chance: 'To develop your software for age and gender identification, we provide you with a training data set that consists of blog posts, Twitter tweets, social media texts, as well as hotel reviews.' Well, at least my paid Amazon reviews are safe for the time being..."

6 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. assuming too much by roman_mir · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am sure you can pick up on general mood of a person, I am sure you can pick up various clues, but if somebody is set on hiding themselves by providing false information, I don't think you'll be able to identify them without what NSA calls 'meta data', as in pattern of your behaviour. I don't think it will be possible to do a better job than guessing at about 50/50 chance ratio about a person's age and gender if the person in question is actively trying to portray something he or she is not in a single conversation. From a pattern of behaviour? Yes. From a single conversation? ... this assumes too much about people. It assumes that 16 y.o. girls are also not pretending to be something they are not as well...

    --
    You can't handle the truth.
    1. Re: assuming too much by lucm · · Score: 5, Funny

      Gotcha, you're a dude. Girls never use "btw": they use "fyi" with a whiny, self-righteous sarcastic undertone.

      Thinking of that, this applies to flamboyant gay males as well.

      So you are either an overweight straight guy in his early 30s or a Perl script written by an overweight straight guy in his early 30s.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
  2. If you want to read a summary that makes sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    here's your chance to write one.

  3. Wow, what a great racket by EmagGeek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wish I could shell out 300 euro to have my next million-euro commercial product crowdsourced

  4. This is a software contest by mbone · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those puzzled by the description here, this is a software contest, with a 300 Euro prize :

    An award of 300 euros for the best performing approach to author profiling (age and gender identification) is sponsored by Atribus (Corex).

  5. Just what I need ... by MacTO · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now both people and computers will call me a girl.