Gender Identification on Twitter Using the Modified Balanced Winnow

Abstract

With the rapid growth of web-based social networking technologies in recent years, author identification and analysis have proven increasingly useful. Authorship analysis provides information about a document’s author, often including the author’s gender. Men and women are known to write in distinctly different ways, and these differences can be suc- cessfully used to make a gender prediction. Making use of these distinctions between male and female authors, this study demonstrates the use of a simple stream-based neural network to automatically discriminate gender on manually labeled tweets from the Twitter social network. This neural network, the Modified Balanced Winnow, was employed in two ways; the effectiveness of data stream mining was initially examined with an extensive list of n-gram features. Feature selection techniques were then evaluated by drastically reducing the feature list using WEKA’s attribute selec- tion algorithms. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the stream mining approach, achieving an accuracy of 82.48%, a 20.81% increase above the baseline prediction. Using feature selection methods improved the results by an additional 16.03%, to an accuracy of 98.51%. Keywords: