Genderanalyzer: Off target for me
While browsing through New Media Women I came across a link for a service called Genderanalyzer. It purports to be able to tell if a blog is written by a man or a woman:
From the site:
We created Genderanalyzer out of curiosity and fun. It uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. Behind the scene, a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com has been trained on blogs written by men and women. In our lab it seems to works pretty well, we want to see how it performs on the web! We hope you like it!
Well, I put in TNMD and got this:
Uh. Hmmm.
Not sure what to make of this. I’d like to know exactly what type of blogs this classifer was trained on. Were all the “female” blogs extremely feminine ones such as Jezebel or Glam? Were the “male” ones more tech? More serious?
I just can’t fathom how something programmed to read text can’t figure out that anything with “diva” in it would, nine times out of ten, involve estrogen.
Hmmmm.
Huhu, mine too, 57% for Ceci n’est pas une endive
Comment by notafish — January 12, 2009 @ 3:41 pm
Oh wait, I hadn’t read it all. It said “We guess http://blog.notanendive.org is written by a man (57%), however it’s quite gender neutral.”
Comment by notafish — January 12, 2009 @ 3:43 pm
I believe for the classifer, gender neutral = male. Hmmmm.
Comment by RT — January 12, 2009 @ 4:11 pm
Heh. My RT.com site scored 89% written by a MAN. My perfume site: 89% woman. The classifier is going on stereotypes probably.
Comment by RT — January 12, 2009 @ 4:13 pm
I got the same results: 67% male.
This thing is so far off. However, the poll results say that it’s usually more right than wrong. Are more males than females using the service?
Comment by Corvida — January 13, 2009 @ 2:35 am
Very interesting. It says my site is written by a man too! 53%
Comment by neoCarla — January 13, 2009 @ 3:32 am
So wait. Out of the four of us who have tested this, it hasn’t gotten any right?
Comment by RT — January 13, 2009 @ 9:00 am