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Ask HN: flirt140, how are they determining the gender?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/fked-company-and-adbrite-founder-launches-twitter-dating-site-flirt140/
flirt140 - Yet another twitter app :-(
one line caught the attention though
"Kaplan says a proprietary algorithm is used to determine gender of Twitter users and claims that it’s pretty accurate"
Any idea how they are determining the gender?
- vaksel 17y agothey are probably doing simple stuff like checking the type of words they used. Like if twit has "xoxoxo" then its a female or they check the user's friends and look for references to the user in their twits. i.e. "vijayr posted that [he] created a new thread on hackernews"
- vijayr 17y agohmm. that much isn't difficult to do - I checked out the site, didn't find a single mistake in 7-8 attempts of searching. Does this mean, that they also determine businesses/organizations and drop them from their list?
- MichaelApproved 17y agoMy first step would be with first names. Michael = Boy and Amy = Girl. You'd be able to cover most of the users like this. Look for He/She in messages directed @User.
- vijayr 17y agoyes, I thought about it. but how many names can you save/check like that? won't it be a tedious process? Also, what about names from Europe, muslim names etc?
- jaydub 17y agoGuessing randomly you have a 50% chance of being right. Weight the odds based on a few rules of thumb and voila?
- MichaelApproved 17y agoYou build a database and program to match the names to a list. The database would contain only a few thousand records which would be easy to manage and speedy. Very simple process for a programmer. None of this work should be done manually. For names you don't know you keep using other means to dig further. But no matter what tools I would use, matching names to gender would be highest weighted procedure and the first thing I'd try. Of course, there would have to be second and third things to try too. Remember, these guys didn't say they were 100%. Who even knows what their definition of "pretty accurate" is.
- kwamenum86 17y agoThe company I work for can determine gender based on first name with 80 percent accuracy. I never bothered asking how but most names are gender-specific. As mentioned on other comments on this page there are significant difference between the written expression of men and women although that gap may be narrowed when you are limited to 140 characters.
- MichaelApproved 17y agoWhy does "yet another twitter app" make you :(
- vijayr 17y agonothing against twitter, just that there is too much twitter news these days. it is a great, fun and useful service, but not exactly world changing
- patio11 17y agoI don't know about Twitter, but determining gender (on average) from English language text is pretty much a solved problem in natural language processing. http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html See this paper: http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final.pdf http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final.... Sidenote: this was an epic win for me in Gender Studies class, when I said that not only was the professor's claim that the genders communicate "essentially identically but with some individual variation" wrong, but I would constructively demonstrate it by blind-assigning a stack of any papers she cared to give me. (I also gave her a copy of the above paper, which she read with interest.) The class then retreated from the scary notion of binary decisions on the basis of the scientific method to the more comfortable one of endless arguing whether the differences were socially constructed or biological.
- vijayr 17y agothat is a neat link. thank you for posting it.
- MichaelApproved 17y agoI submitted this HN post and it says you're Male for both formal and informal. So, whats the verdict Patio11, are you Male or Female? Great link nonetheless.
- vijayr 17y agopatio11 is male. I submitted a few text too, its quite accurate.
- patio11 17y agoI have always found it kind of... (weird? An amusing quirk of the culture?) that my HN account is tied very closely with my real identity and yet I'm always addressed by login name rather than real name here. I guess you can file that away as yet another example of the power of defaults. On other business-related forums, like the Business of Software board, everyone either calls me Patrick or "that bingo guy". That might be because of the display name alone.
- tlrobinson 17y agoUgh I logged in through OAuth and it automatically made me follow their Twitter account. There should have more fine-grained control over what applications can do without asking/telling me.
- MichaelApproved 17y agoWhat was their twitter account name?
- tlrobinson 17y agoflirt140
- ashishk 17y agowant to know the secret? you're going to love it. when you login, you have to run a search. it asks whether you're a guy/girl looking for a guy/girl. i'm guessing they might just save that first parameter, no? that said, that natural language processing link is really sweet.
- ryanwaggoner 17y agoPerhaps they're using something like this method of guessing gender based on browsing history: http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/ http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-h...