Demographer: Extremely Simple Name Demographics

The lack of demographic information available when conducting passive analysis of social media content can make it difficult to compare results to traditional survey results. We present DEMOGRAPHER,1 a tool that predicts gender from names, using name lists and a classifier with simple character-level features. By relying only on a name, our tool can make predictions even without extensive user-authored content. We compare DEMOGRAPHER to other available tools and discuss differences in performance. In particular, we show that DEMOGRAPHER performs well on Twitter data, making it useful for simple and rapid social media demographic inference.