Ask HN: flirt140, how are they determining the gender?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=608057

by vijayr • 17 years ago

27 36 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/fked-company-and-adbrite-founder-launches-twitter-dating-site-flirt140/

flirt140 - Yet another twitter app :-(

one line caught the attention though

"Kaplan says a proprietary algorithm is used to determine gender of Twitter users and claims that it’s pretty accurate"

Any idea how they are determining the gender?

vaksel• 17 years ago

they are probably doing simple stuff like checking the type of words they used. Like if twit has "xoxoxo" then its a female or they check the user's friends and look for references to the user in their twits. i.e. "vijayr posted that [he] created a new thread on hackernews"

vijayr5• 17 years ago

hmm. that much isn't difficult to do - I checked out the site, didn't find a single mistake in 7-8 attempts of searching. Does this mean, that they also determine businesses/organizations and drop them from their list?

MichaelApproved5• 17 years ago

My first step would be with first names. Michael = Boy and Amy = Girl. You'd be able to cover most of the users like this.

Look for He/She in messages directed @User.

vijayr5• 17 years ago

yes, I thought about it. but how many names can you save/check like that? won't it be a tedious process? Also, what about names from Europe, muslim names etc?

jaydub• 17 years ago

Guessing randomly you have a 50% chance of being right. Weight the odds based on a few rules of thumb and voila?

MichaelApproved5• 17 years ago

You build a database and program to match the names to a list. The database would contain only a few thousand records which would be easy to manage and speedy. Very simple process for a programmer. None of this work should be done manually.

For names you don't know you keep using other means to dig further. But no matter what tools I would use, matching names to gender would be highest weighted procedure and the first thing I'd try. Of course, there would have to be second and third things to try too.

Remember, these guys didn't say they were 100%. Who even knows what their definition of "pretty accurate" is.

kwamenum862• 17 years ago

The company I work for can determine gender based on first name with 80 percent accuracy. I never bothered asking how but most names are gender-specific. As mentioned on other comments on this page there are significant difference between the written expression of men and women although that gap may be narrowed when you are limited to 140 characters.

MichaelApproved5• 17 years ago

Why does "yet another twitter app" make you :(

vijayr5• 17 years ago

nothing against twitter, just that there is too much twitter news these days. it is a great, fun and useful service, but not exactly world changing

patio113• 17 years ago

I don't know about Twitter, but determining gender (on average) from English language text is pretty much a solved problem in natural language processing.

http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html

See this paper:

http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final....

Sidenote: this was an epic win for me in Gender Studies class, when I said that not only was the professor's claim that the genders communicate "essentially identically but with some individual variation" wrong, but I would constructively demonstrate it by blind-assigning a stack of any papers she cared to give me. (I also gave her a copy of the above paper, which she read with interest.) The class then retreated from the scary notion of binary decisions on the basis of the scientific method to the more comfortable one of endless arguing whether the differences were socially constructed or biological.

vijayr5• 17 years ago

that is a neat link. thank you for posting it.

MichaelApproved5• 17 years ago

I submitted this HN post and it says you're Male for both formal and informal.

So, whats the verdict Patio11, are you Male or Female?

Great link nonetheless.

vijayr5• 17 years ago

patio11 is male. I submitted a few text too, its quite accurate.

d0mine• 17 years ago

Gender Guesser is less accurate (60%-70%) for HN then a Perl one-liner (>95%):

    say 'Male'

aneesh• 17 years ago

There's a similar service at genderanalyzer.com, based on UClassify's API - http://blog.uclassify.com/gender-text-analysis/.

It thinks Sergey Brin writes like a woman: http://www.genderanalyzer.com/?url=too.blogspot.com

jdale27• 17 years ago

Maybe that ad for 23andme was actually written by Sergey's wife.

blurry• 17 years ago

What a load of crap. According to this tool, Linus Torvalds writes like a woman, and so do Zed Shaw and Steve Yegge.

jhamburger• 17 years ago

Just looked at a few dozen tweets, the use of exclamation points seems to be a dead giveaway.

badger7• 17 years ago

I hate that!!!!!! It's one of my myriad pet peeves!!!!!!! Along wif spellen like ur a morun, wevver it's on perpose or not!!!!! It makes you look like a drama queen!!!!!!! Which, to me at least, is a huge insult!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And it's some inane piece of misspelled, new-age bullshit far too often!!!!!!! Shock!!! Horror!!!!!!! Shock!!!!! Horror!!!!!!!! <slap>

Sorry. Has anyone built the total perspective vortex yet?

kwamenum862• 17 years ago

But does this work this same way with a 140 character limit since people are often forced to express themselves in a different way?

jey• 17 years ago

As long as you have an appropriate training set, I don't see why it would be significantly different. You might run into problems if you train the classifier on some radically different dataset but then try to run it against twitter accounts.

daveying99• 17 years ago

The twitter API gives access to a large number of a user's latest tweets. So it's a series of 140 characters which makes the gender classifier more accurate.

dangoldin• 17 years ago

Thanks for the links!

I find it pretty cool that the first site only does the guessing based on a pretty small list of words - you can see it by viewing the source.

Some words are more commonly male and others are more commonly female - looks as if that's all it is doing.

johnnybgoode2• 17 years ago

That was great. Gender Studies class, huh?

By the way, Gender Guesser gave me a good laugh when I ran it on a comment from HN. It said, "Verdict: Weak MALE Weak emphasis could indicate European."

A scientific basis for the effeminate European stereotype??

Edit: I was joking about the stereotype.

patio113• 17 years ago

Gender Studies class, huh?

It was a requirement for graduation with a Arts & Sciences degree (I dual-degreed with CS from Engineering) that I demonstrated an interest in subjects covering things other than dead white males. For reasons which were never really clear to me, "I'm an East Asian Studies major!" was not sufficient, so my choices were either Gender Studies or The History of Jazz.

I will say this for required common curricula: if you only take courses which you're interested in or whose built-in intellectual biases are flattering to yours, then you're missing out on a good deal of the educational experience.

I will also say this against required common curricula: there were no gender studies majors in AI class.

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

Ugh I logged in through OAuth and it automatically made me follow their Twitter account. There should have more fine-grained control over what applications can do without asking/telling me.

MichaelApproved5• 17 years ago

What was their twitter account name?

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

flirt140

ashishk• 17 years ago

want to know the secret? you're going to love it.

when you login, you have to run a search. it asks whether you're a guy/girl looking for a guy/girl. i'm guessing they might just save that first parameter, no?

that said, that natural language processing link is really sweet.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

Perhaps they're using something like this method of guessing gender based on browsing history:

http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-h...

Ask HN: flirt140, how are they determining the gender?

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