User Modeling in Social Media: Gender and Age Detection

Abstract

Author profiling is a field within Natural Language Processing (NLP) that is concerned with identifying various characteristics and demographic factors of authors, such as gender, age, location, native language, political orientation, and personality by analyzing the style and content of their writings. There is a growing interest in author profiling, with applications in marketing and advertising, opinion mining, personalization, recommendation systems, forensics, security, and defense.

In this work, we build several classification models using NLP, Deep Learning, and classical Machine Learning techniques that can identify the gender and age of a Twitter user based on the textual contents of their correspondence (tweets) on the platform.

Our SVM gender classifier utilizes a combination of word and character n-grams as features, dimensionality reduction using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier with linear kernel. At the PAN 2018 author profiling shared task, this model achieved the highest performance with 82.21%, 82.00%, and 80.90% accuracy on the English, Spanish, and Arabic datasets, respectively. Our age classifier was trained on a dataset of 11,160 Twitter users, using the same approach, though the age classification experiments are preliminary.

Our Deep Learning gender classifiers are trained and tested on English datasets. Our feedforward neural network consisting of a word embedding layer, flattening, and two densely-connected layers achieves 79.57% accuracy, and our bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network achieves 76.85% accuracy on the gender classification task.