5 ms·
> Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues to predict a speaker or writer's gender with considerable confidence. Do you have any examples
by qsort 5y ago
> Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues to predict a speaker or writer's gender with considerable confidence.
Do you have any examples of this?
Not saying I don't believe you, but unless the text contains something very obvious (e.g. "my wife"), I often can't tell if the writer is a man or a woman.
It's much easier to tell in Italian, French or Spanish, for example, all languages where the gender of the speaker is baked into most sentences.
- jameshart 5y agoWhile you can certainly use statements like that to adjust your priors, be careful not to make absolute assumptions - in the US approximately 1% of people who have a wife are women.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoJust to clarify to help avoid some awkward moments... In the U.S., the normalization of gay marriage has involved a lot of cultural strife over the past few decades. One may still encounter cliques in the U.S. that refuse to accept grammatical constructs such as "her wife" for various reasons.
- namelessoracle 5y agoIf your machine learning model had a indicator that could point to something with 99 percent accuracy, you would tell it to ignore that?
- jameshart 5y agoWell, no. And that isn’t what I said, is it?
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoI would say that an assumption with 99% accuracy is a pretty good one.
- retrac 5y agoSome anecdotes I remember regarding American English: men pose fewer questions, are more likely to use double negative forms, and use the passive voice less. Many word choices are somewhat gendered as well. One reply gives the obvious example of "lovely" being much more commonly used by women, but many words are like that. Even a simple choice like which empty qualifier you use -- "drastically", "dramatically", "enormously", "badly", "awfully" -- can apparently tip the scales one way or the other. (I don't know which is supposedly which for those!) These are small differences individually, but summed up they apparently become considerable.
- tech2 5y agoThere is a site I'd used a while back for exactly this when I was trying to ensure that my writing (and speech) in some fiction was gendered in a particular manner - https://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze https://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze Playing "guess why" is the fun part :) I'm sure there are other tools available now and I'd love to hear of them if people are aware of them!
- silvester23 5y agoI don't speak any Spanish or Italian, but I had French in school (it's been a while) and I presently cannot recall how the gender of the speaker is more obvious than in, say, English. I'm curious, could you give me an example please?
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y agoMany adjectives in Spanish have gender, so for example: I'm tired (male) -> estoy cansado I'm tired (female) -> estoy cansada In French it works the same way, although I'm not confident enough in French to give you an example without making horrible spelling mistakes. But the idea is the same.
- Rels 5y agoFor French: I'm tired (male) -> Je suis fatigué I'm tired (female) -> Je suis fatiguée
- forinti 5y agoThe French passé composé is funny if translated word for word into Portuguese: Je suis tombé -> Eu sou caído (or Eu sou tombado) Je suis tombée -> Eu sou caída (or Eu sou tombada)
- WastingMyTime89 5y agoJe suis tombé is passé composé. Je suis fatigué is présent de l'indicatif. Fatigué can both be an adjectif and a participe passé. The verb fatiguer uses the avoir auxiliary verb when using passé composé however: ils m'ont fatigué / la poutre a fatigué sous le poids.
- simiones 5y agoThe passé composé of "je suis fatigué(e)" [I am tired] would actually be "j'ai été fatigué(e)" [I was tired]. Translated word for word to Portuguese, this would be "Eu tive sido/estado cansado(cansada)".
- 3np 5y agoHere's an essay exploring that https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1023448/FULLTEXT01.pdf https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1023448/FULLTEXT...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mojuba 5y agoEven as a non-native English speaker I can tell you off the top of my head: "lovely" in the American culture is predominantly used by women (though in the British culture exceptions can be made more often). But I'm sure there are a lot of more subtle differences too.
- kwhitefoot 5y agoBritish culture is very much not homogeneous in this regard. The use of words like lovely probably tells a British speaker more about the geographical origin of the speaker than their sex.