On a blog without a name

This tool aims to predict the gender of the writer of a passage of text. The paper on which that tool is based is also on the internet. Interestingly, the prediction is based on things such as pronouns (women use more, it seems) and preferences for particular grammatical constructs (men prefer to say ‘garden of roses’ to ‘rose garden’). The researchers suggest that men prefer ‘informational’ language – both in terms of structure and content men prefer to provide specific information, tending to give more information about quantity, time and place. Women prefer narrative to information, they suggest. Whatever the merits of their interpretation, not all of which has me convinced, the tool based on their research appears to work well.