On the relationship of writing style, gender and personality in social texts: MySpace Case Study

ANTONELA TOMMASEL; JOSÉ MARÍA BALMACEDA; DANIELA GODOY; SILVIA SCHIAFFINO

Naiguatá, Vargas

Conferencia; V Congreso de la Mujer Latinoamericana en la Computación (LAWCC-2013); 2013

In the context of social networks, the ability to classify users according to their gender based only on short texts has important applications. Several approaches based on word, character frequencies and syntactic features were proposed in the literature. Although Psychology studies distinguish between sex and gender stating that while sex is a biological characteristic, gender responds to social in?uences; most approaches cast the problem of gender identification as a problem of sex identification. This work presents a case study aiming at assessing the actual differences in how women and men write in the context of social networks and whether those stylistic differences are enough for predicting biological sex, as it is suggested in related works. A statistical analysis of data showed that feminine and masculine users have similar writing styles. Low accuracy results indicated that there is not a strong relationship among biological sex and writing style, leading to the conclusion that language and written style respond to social stimuli, which can equally affect both women and men.