A Semi-Supervised Approach for Gender Identification

In most of the research studies on Author Profiling, large quantities of correctly labeled data are used to train the models. However, this does not reflect the reality in forensic scenarios: in practical linguistic forensic investigations, the resources that are available to profile the author of a text are usually scarce. To pay tribute to this fact, we implemented a Semi-Supervised Learning variant of the k nearest neighbors algorithm that uses small sets of labeled data and a larger amount of unlabeled data to classify the authors of texts by gender (man vs woman). We describe the enriched KNN algorithm and show that the use of unlabeled instances improves the accuracy of our gender identification model. We also present a feature set that facilitates the use of a very small number of instances, reaching accuracies higher than 70% with only 113 instances to train the model. It is also shown that the algorithm performs equally well using publicly available data.