Learning age and gender of blogger from stylistic variation

Abstract

We report results of stylistic differences in blogging for gender and age group variation. The results are based on two mutually independent features. The first feature is the use of slang words which is a new concept proposed by us for Stylistic study of bloggers. For the second feature, we have analyzed the variation in average length of sentences across various age groups and gender. These features are augmented with previous study results reported in literature for stylistic analysis. The combined feature list enhances the accuracy by a remarkable extent in predicting age and gender. These machine learning experiments were done on two separate demographically tagged blog corpus. Gender determination is more accurate than age group detection over the data spread across all ages but the accuracy of age prediction increases if we sample data with remarkable age difference. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.