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"since being able to identify gender from a name would be an awesome " Way to misgender and insult a number of your users. As you said it is an impossible task

"since being able to identify gender from a name would be an awesome " Way to misgender and insult a number of your users. As you said it is an impossible task and the result is telling "for gender neutral names (ie "Alex" or "Taylor")," The best way is to not care, it almost never matters, and when it does, ask.

guptaneil 10y ago
Totally agree, that was poor phrasing on my part. I meant if it was theoretically possible somehow, it would be awesome, but agree that it is impossible even if the name "Tony". I think this issue on the nlp-compromise project sums it up nicely: https://github.com/nlp-compromise/nlp_compromise/issues/117 https://github.com/nlp-compromise/nlp_compromise/issues/117
- komali2 10y ago
  I find this absurd. This is natural language processing. What do languages have? Gendered pronouns. Some languages have gendered nouns. We use language to communicate information about our environment. Whether or not someone is male or female may be irrelevant to how they perform in certain tasks, ie, don't judge someone by their race/gender obviously. However, purposely crippling a natural language processor by removing its ability to use language to determine gender is insanity.
  - mineshaftgap 10y ago
    PC culture eventually eats its own.
  - tripzilch 10y ago
    I believe the problem is with the language, which evolved with a not-very-modern concept of gender. Some languages run into problems more so or differently than others. Related is why there's resistance to new gender-neutral pronouns such as "xe" etc. (which I'm not sure are the solution either). There exist social constructs now that English (and other languages, but sometimes differently) just has not evolved to handle properly. Problem is that pronouns hold a very key place in the structure of many languages, affecting tenses and such. Things that evolved organically aren't very "future-proof". I don't know a good solution either, except maybe time.
revelation 10y ago
This is a natural language library, and languages still care very much about gender.
- dack 10y ago
  but can a function which is basically "name -> gender" really be honest with its users? It's claiming something that would require much more information to predict with any reasonable chance of success (even excluding lgbt folks). If you look at the files it is based on, it looks like there are only a tiny number of names defined anyway - what hope does the user have of accomplishing the goal they want? Now, I might accept an API in which machine learning was involved and tons of historical data was included as input before predicting the value. Even then, it would of course have a decent potential of being wrong, but at least the result would be a more realistic claim. The current API feels a lot like this sort of thing: boolean isHappySentence(String sentence) { return sentence.contains(":)"); } Sure, it might get it right some of the time, but it's not effective enough to be useful.
  - komali2 10y ago
    Every single aspect of this API has a degree of uncertainty. If you'd like to improve the capability of the algorithm, put in some PRs to help out the accuracy.
- spraak 10y ago
  Right, but I think that they're pointing out that it's important to understand that gender is much more than a grammatical construct. It's not even just he/she as some people identify e.g. as fluid or other non binary genders
- dustinmr 10y ago
  If you get outside of English and think of romance languages, every noun has a gender, and it changes the words you use based on that gender. Its a typical mistake non-native, and even native speakers, make in Spanish. Definitely one of the things I still regularly get wrong after 9 years of speaking the language daily. Which makes it potentially very important to trying to machine process a language.
fuj 10y ago
HN is not a place for trolling, unless you're serious, then I cringe
spraak 10y ago
After seeing the Tony -> he example I felt the same way. Just as a simple example I know someone named Tony who identifies as female gender.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  Well, you have to pick an option - there are many names that are used by both genders, but in unequal amounts; and it's better to get e.g. 10% of pronouns wrong than 90% of cases by using "she" for Tony (if you have nothing else to go by except that name) or 99% of cases wrong by using "they".

guptaneil 10y ago

Totally agree, that was poor phrasing on my part. I meant if it was theoretically possible somehow, it would be awesome, but agree that it is impossible even if the name "Tony". I think this issue on the nlp-compromise project sums it up nicely: https://github.com/nlp-compromise/nlp_compromise/issues/117 https://github.com/nlp-compromise/nlp_compromise/issues/117

komali2 10y ago
I find this absurd. This is natural language processing. What do languages have? Gendered pronouns. Some languages have gendered nouns. We use language to communicate information about our environment. Whether or not someone is male or female may be irrelevant to how they perform in certain tasks, ie, don't judge someone by their race/gender obviously. However, purposely crippling a natural language processor by removing its ability to use language to determine gender is insanity.
- mineshaftgap 10y ago
  PC culture eventually eats its own.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  I believe the problem is with the language, which evolved with a not-very-modern concept of gender. Some languages run into problems more so or differently than others. Related is why there's resistance to new gender-neutral pronouns such as "xe" etc. (which I'm not sure are the solution either). There exist social constructs now that English (and other languages, but sometimes differently) just has not evolved to handle properly. Problem is that pronouns hold a very key place in the structure of many languages, affecting tenses and such. Things that evolved organically aren't very "future-proof". I don't know a good solution either, except maybe time.

revelation 10y ago

This is a natural language library, and languages still care very much about gender.

dack 10y ago
but can a function which is basically "name -> gender" really be honest with its users? It's claiming something that would require much more information to predict with any reasonable chance of success (even excluding lgbt folks). If you look at the files it is based on, it looks like there are only a tiny number of names defined anyway - what hope does the user have of accomplishing the goal they want? Now, I might accept an API in which machine learning was involved and tons of historical data was included as input before predicting the value. Even then, it would of course have a decent potential of being wrong, but at least the result would be a more realistic claim. The current API feels a lot like this sort of thing: boolean isHappySentence(String sentence) { return sentence.contains(":)"); } Sure, it might get it right some of the time, but it's not effective enough to be useful.
- komali2 10y ago
  Every single aspect of this API has a degree of uncertainty. If you'd like to improve the capability of the algorithm, put in some PRs to help out the accuracy.
spraak 10y ago
Right, but I think that they're pointing out that it's important to understand that gender is much more than a grammatical construct. It's not even just he/she as some people identify e.g. as fluid or other non binary genders
dustinmr 10y ago
If you get outside of English and think of romance languages, every noun has a gender, and it changes the words you use based on that gender. Its a typical mistake non-native, and even native speakers, make in Spanish. Definitely one of the things I still regularly get wrong after 9 years of speaking the language daily. Which makes it potentially very important to trying to machine process a language.

fuj 10y ago

HN is not a place for trolling, unless you're serious, then I cringe

spraak 10y ago

After seeing the Tony -> he example I felt the same way. Just as a simple example I know someone named Tony who identifies as female gender.

PeterisP 10y ago
Well, you have to pick an option - there are many names that are used by both genders, but in unequal amounts; and it's better to get e.g. 10% of pronouns wrong than 90% of cases by using "she" for Tony (if you have nothing else to go by except that name) or 99% of cases wrong by using "they".