Using sociolinguistic inspired features for gender classification of web authors

Abstract

In this article we present a methodology for classification of text from web authors, using sociolinguistic inspired text features. The proposed methodology uses a baseline text mining based feature set, which is combined with text features that quantify results from theoretical and sociolinguistic studies. Two combination approaches were evaluated and the evaluation results indicated a significant improvement in both combination cases. For the best performing combination approach the accuracy was 84.36%, in terms of percentage of correctly classified web posts.