Chicks Dig Personal Pronouns

Question

A group of scholars has created a text-analysis computer program that can determine the sex of an author with 80% accuracy. From The Boston Globe:

Koppel's group found that the single biggest difference is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns-''I'', you, she, myself, or yourself and the like. Men, in contrast, are more likely to use determiners-''a,'' ''the,'' ''that,'' and these - as well as cardinal numbers and quantifiers like more or ''some.'' As one of the papers published by Koppel's group notes, men are also more likely to use post-head noun modification with an of phrase-phrases like ''garden of roses.'

Your pal, Barney

Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble. --- Stefan Kanfer

Usenet · Accepted Answer

, in part:
[nq:1]A group of scholars has created a text-analysis computer program that can determine the *** of an author with 80% accuracy.[/nq]
He then went on to quote things like
[nq:1]women are far more likely than men to use personal pronounsthan men, who are more likely. to use words like "a" and "this".[/nq]
This would seem to depend quite a bit on what was written. For example, a deposition by a man might have more personal pronouns than a dissertation by a woman.

But I suppose that other distinguishers of *** will help.

Also, perhaps you have to tell the machine what it is you're feeding it (or perhaps it tries to figure that out too).

Michael Hamm BA scl Math, PBK, NYU (Email Removed) Note new URL: http://www.math.wustl.edu/~msh210/

Usenet · Answer

In article , (Email Removed) (Michael Hamm) writes:
[nq:2]A group of scholars has created a text-analysis computer program that can determine the *** of an author with 80% accuracy.[/nq]
[nq:1]He then went on to quote things like[/nq]
[nq:2]women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns[/nq]
[nq:1]than men, who are more likely. to use words like "a" and "this". This would seem to depend quite a bit on what was written. For example, a deposition by a man might have more personal pronouns than a dissertation by a woman.[/nq]
Yes - to get around that difficulty they chose a fairly large sample of wildly diverse material. Another quote from the article:

"Koppel's team crunched 604 texts taken from the British National Corpus, a collection of 4,124 documents assembled by academics to help study modern language use. Half of the chosen texts were written by men and half by women; they ranged from novels such as Julian Barnes's Talking It Over to works of nonfiction (including even some pop ephemera, such as an instant-biography of the singer Kylie Minogue). The scientists removed all the topic-specific words, leaving the non-topic-specific ones behind."
[nq:1]But I suppose that other distinguishers of *** will help. Also, perhaps you have to tell the machine what it is you're feeding it (or perhaps it tries to figure that out too).[/nq]
On the contrary, they don't want the machine to know what sort of document it's being fed. They want it to determine the *** of the author based solely on word choice.

Your pal, Barney

Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble. --- Stefan Kanfer

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]men are also more likely to use ''post-head noun modification[/nq]
They're **** lucky to be getting any, without modifying their nouns afterwards.

-- Rob Bannister

Usenet · Answer

In article (Email Removed), Robert Bannister (Email Removed) writes:
[nq:2]men are also more likely to use ''post-head noun modification[/nq]
[nq:1]They're **** lucky to be getting any, without modifying their nouns afterwards.[/nq]
Hey, let's keep it clean. This is a family newsgroup.

Your pal, Barney

Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble. --- Stefan Kanfer

Usenet · Answer

(Email Removed) (Michael Hamm) writes:
[nq:1], in part:[/nq]
[nq:2]A group of scholars has created a text-analysis computer program that can determine the *** of an author with 80% accuracy.[/nq]
[nq:1]He then went on to quote things like[/nq]
[nq:2]women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns[/nq]
[nq:1]than men, who are more likely. to use words like "a" and "this". This would seem to depend quite a bit on what was written. For example, a deposition by a man might have more personal pronouns than a dissertation by a woman.[/nq]
It works even better if the comparisons are made across similar material. But it doesn't need that assistance to work as well as claimed.

-- Chris Malcolm (Email Removed) +44 (0)131 650 3085 DoD #205 School of Informatics, Edinburgh University, 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK. (http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/ )

Chicks Dig Personal Pronouns

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