PCFormat Forum Archive

Linguists Out Men Impersonating Women On Twitter
Posted by timothy on Thursday July 28, @06:58PM
from the anything-that-can-be-described-can-be-faked dept.
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."

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.

KatrynKat wrote:says the person who also uses smilies a lot....

jamin_za wrote:Cunning Linguist...

Anakha56 wrote:

KatrynKat wrote:says the person who also uses smilies a lot....

Fixed that for you . It is meant to be present tense not past .

Tribble wrote:An old Monty python joke or was that Black Adder. Never can keep my comedies straight.

Stuart wrote:I don't get it.

Tribble wrote:

Stuart wrote:I don't get it.

Your poor wife!