Can you pick a person's gender from his or her writing?
Check out the Gender Genie for yourself, and give it a try. I copied some near-random chunk of text from a number of Salon blogs, and put it to the test. It correctly picked out me as male, and Rayne as female. Good start.
Then I let it look at a few paragraphs of Amanda's writing, and rather surprisingly it guessed male. It did the same, again pretty surprising, with a few paragraphs from Susannah. Just to prove itself bunk, it said that Christopher is female.
In the end, it was right about Kriselda being female. But from the results submitted to it earlier, it seems to be quite exactly 50% correct, which suggests that for short chunks of texts at least, it is no better than flipping a coin.
5:58:24 AM 
|
