Stylometric Analysis of Bloggers' Age and Gender

We report results of stylometric differences in blogging for gender and age group variation. The results are based on two mutually independent features. The first feature is the use of slang words which is a new concept proposed by us for Stylometric study of bloggers. Slang is a non-dictionary word that has evolved with time due to its frequent and popular usage. For the second feature, we have analysed the variation in average length of sentences across various age groups and gender. These two features are then augmented with previous study results reported in literature for stylometric analysis of age and gender. The combined feature list enhances the accuracy by a remarkable extent in predicting age and gender. These experiments were done on a 20,000 blog corpus. Experimental results show that these features work well in detection of bloggers’ demography. However, gender determination is more accurate than age group detection over a data spread across all ages but the accuracy of age prediction increases if we sample data with remarkable age difference. Introduction Gender and age are the common demographic features used for experimentation using stylometry as the blogs generally contain these information provided by the author. Style in writing is a result of the subconscious habit of the writer of using one form over a number of available options to present the same thing. The variation also evolves with the usage of the language in certain period, genre, situation or individuals. Variation are of two types – variation within a norm which is grammatically correct and deviation from the norm which in ungrammatical. The variations can be described in linguistic as well as statistical terms (McMenamin 2002). Concept and themes (Leximancer 2008; Weber 1990) can be determined from variations within the norm while usage of non-dictionary words or slang is an example of deviation from a norm. Blogs substantially reduced the technical and language skills required to publish. It has brought forward a wide variety of reporting techniques, content type, style and goals of blogging. Bloggers generally express their thoughts in an informal, unreserved and unorganized manner through the blogs. The language used here has a mixed characteristic of spoken and written language constructs like use of jargons, abbreviations, too many exclamations, short sentences, emotion symbols etc. The topics which were considered private are openly discussed by the teenagers and young adults (Mishne 2006).