Detecting gender by full name: Experiments with the Russian language

Abstract

This paper describes a method that detects gender of a person by his/her full name. While some approaches were proposed for English language, little has been done so far for Russian. We fill this gap and present a large-scale experiment on a dataset of 100,000 Russian full names from Facebook. Our method is based on three types of features (word endings, character n-grams and dictionary of names) combined within a linear supervised model. Experiments show that the proposed simple and computationally efficient approach yields excellent results achieving accuracy up to 96 %.