Is there open source software available that analyses a string and guesses the gender of the author?

Question

I can't find anything other than closed-source web applications. Are there any active projects? I'd be interested in using the software in something I'm developing and getting involved.

Answer 1

Since you're assuming two categories, almost any classifier will probably do ok. Some suggestions:

• Naive bayes
• support vector machines

As an earlier commenter said, starting from a known sample of text (and there should be plenty... newspaper corpuses might be good), train and classify, on some reasonable attributes (maybe presence / absence or words or word pairs).

This one should be (comparatively) easy.

If you're using python, even something as simple as the Natural Language Toolkit (cf: nltk.org) and their book should get you a lot of way there.

Answer 2

Here's another web site that claims to do this: GenderAnalyzer. However it is relying on another website called uClassify.com that is down as I write this. They have a contact link at the bottom for questions.

It sounds like an academic outfit: "In our lab it seems to works pretty well".

Answer 3

There are applications like "The Gender Genie" which operate within a reasonable degree of success: http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php (and particularly with longer texts)

It doesn't need to be entirely successful. I would have huge amounts of data to deal with, and it's mostly just for fun.

If anyone knows of anything, please do share.

Richard