Genderanalyzer: Off target for me
by RT
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
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.”
I believe for the classifer, gender neutral = male. Hmmmm.
Heh. My RT.com site scored 89% written by a MAN. My perfume site: 89% woman. The classifier is going on stereotypes probably.
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?
Very interesting. It says my site is written by a man too! 53%
So wait. Out of the four of us who have tested this, it hasn’t gotten any right?