

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

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/fked-company-and-adbrite-founder-launches-twitter-dating-site-flirt140/<p>flirt140 - Yet another twitter app :-(<p>one line caught the attention though<p>"Kaplan says a proprietary algorithm is used to determine gender of Twitter users and claims that it’s pretty accurate"<p>Any idea how they are determining the gender?
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patio11
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....](http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final.pdf)

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.

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

------
ashishk
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.

------
tlrobinson
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.

~~~
MichaelApproved
What was their twitter account name?

~~~
tlrobinson
flirt140

------
MichaelApproved
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.

~~~
vijayr
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?

~~~
MichaelApproved
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.

------
ryanwaggoner
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...](http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-
estimate-gender/)

------
vaksel
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"

~~~
vijayr
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?

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

~~~
vijayr
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

