Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kala]

What gender do you speak in?

So, as part of the general hoohah of the last few days, I encountered someone who was arguing Anita Sarkeesian faked her own harassment, because the person threatening to come to her house, hurt her family and rape her, did so in the 'female voice'.

'Female voice', I thought?  Waaaa?

He explained with training and applications, you can pick out with a fair degree of accuracy, the gender of the speaker from text alone.  I was dubious but duly trotted along to one of these applications, put in the threats, and it did come out as female!

However, it wanted 300 words or above to be 'accurate'. (the screenshot of the threats that person made only had about 71 words in them).

Hm, I thought.  Let's test this a bit more.  I think I can pull out 300+ words from stuff I've written on the internet <.<  >.>

So I paste in my words.

...The result came out as male. 

Genre: Informal
  Female = 816
  Male   = 1296
  Difference = 480; 61.36%
  Verdict: MALE

(and pasting in my 300+ words from this forum gives me the more insulting sounding 'weak male')

I'm unsure how I feel about this result, other than the test (and the premise around it) is complete bobbins.  (and in fairness, on the website they're a lot more upfront about it's flaws than the guy I first spoke to).

But! Bobbins can be a fun thing to play with.  So grab 300 words (or whatever you can get) and see if you speak in a male or female voice. For the lulz.

http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze

edit: meant to say words, not characters -.-;

[Nissui]

Used the fiction entry I posted some months ago in that subforum.

Genre: Formal
  Female = 1408
  Male   = 1389
  Difference = -19; 49.66%
  Verdict: Weak FEMALE

Weak emphasis could indicate European.

Somehow I think it is harder to fool real people than the Guesser. 

[Lyn Farel]

Waaaaa.

Genre: Informal
  Female = 782
  Male   = 802
  Difference = 20; 50.63%
  Verdict: Weak MALE

Weak emphasis could indicate European.

Genre: Formal
  Female = 500
  Male   = 499
  Difference = -1; 49.94%
  Verdict: Weak FEMALE

Weak emphasis could indicate European.

Waitaminute... Weak = european now ? 

[Mizhara]

A weak result in this case is where it's less distinguishable as male or female which can indicate that the author is European. There is apparently less difference between male and female writing over here than over on that side of the pond. It's explained right there on the site. Using a variety of samples, Reddit posts, fiction, forum posts etc it seems to nail me pretty good as European Male except when I write fiction. This is with anything from 30 to 600 words.

[Louella Dougans]

how do the writing styles differ ? sentence length ? vocabulary ?

[Lyn Farel]

A weak result in this case is where it's less distinguishable as male or female which can indicate that the author is European. There is apparently less difference between male and female writing over here than over on that side of the pond. It's explained right there on the site. Using a variety of samples, Reddit posts, fiction, forum posts etc it seems to nail me pretty good as European Male except when I write fiction. This is with anything from 30 to 600 words.

Well yes, that sounds reasonable, but I can't help but itch a bit at the choice of words. Why weak ? It sounds derogatory.

[Kala]

how do the writing styles differ ? sentence length ? vocabulary ?

good question.  It just says "weighted word frequency and parts of speech", so I'm not sure.  I guess it's betting on women saying certain words more often than men and vice versa?  So frequency of word choice or phrases maybe. Again, in fairness, it does acknowledge that that it's going to be no use if a female speaker speaks in a masculine way or vice versa (the example is a woman in a male dominated field) so it's pretty much only going to be able to pick out heavily gendered speech - i,e tell you if your speech happens to contain things that are expressly feminine or masculine somehow, rather than what your actual biological sex is.  I don't know how it decides what word choices are fem and which are masculine though.

Interestingly, it gets me wrong each time  (and the first time it seemed pretty sure I was a bloke too, objectionable gizmo  ) and while I'm not exactly girly or anything, I tend to use a lot of caveats or express things in terms of 'I think' or 'maybe' rather than definite statements.  I'm sure I read somewhere that was a thing women did more, but it's not necessarily a matter of being less sure of myself, just I tend to be an analytical kind of person who will weigh things up.  My statements concretize somewhat if I get progressively annoyed though, so mileage may vary 

ultimately, I think it should be taken as just a bit of fun.  like graphology or something.

Well yes, that sounds reasonable, but I can't help but itch a bit at the choice of words. Why weak ? It sounds derogatory.

  Yeah, Miz is right, it's not saying you're weak. It was all done in American-English, so it's less sure of itself if it's in actual English.  So it's saying the conclusion isn't as strong:

It also looks for weak emphasis -- used to distinguish European English from American English. In general, if the difference between male and female weight values is not significant (a "weak" score), then the author could be European. This is because the weight matrix is biased for distinguishing genders in American English.

But yeah, phrasing is funny nonetheless.  First I'm a man, now I'm a weak European man? WHAT THE FUCK, AMERICA.


edit: putting this post in minus the quotes gave me my first 'weak female' result (328 words).  I think I'm more irritated with that than the previous ones ¬.¬

[Arista Shahni]

This is too creepy for words   I don't want to feed it 300 of anything I said.  Most don't guess I'm a woman until they hear my voice because of my upbringing (mostly always surrounded by brothers, tomboy, etc), and then a decade in the hard sciences.  Romantic movies piss me off, give me robots and explosions, etc. 

Anyone who worries too much about the gender of who is sending any kind of threat unerestimates what a human of any sex is capable of doing to any other one.  Especially with shops like the Sexploratorium.  (Yus.  It exists )

Funny toy though.

[Mizhara]

Had to look up the Sexploratorium. I can't figure out the relevance to the post. It just looks like your average kink shop?

Edit: I take that back, it looks like a damn good kink shop.

[Arista Shahni]

yup, read OP, as to how this little ap got discovered  aka it doesnt matter what "gender" Anonymous speaker was threatening in.

[Ché Biko]

As expected:

Genre: Informal
  Female = 671
  Male   = 534
  Difference = -137; 44.31%
  Verdict: Weak FEMALE

* Ché Biko goes back to the kitchen, doing the dishes in the water of his tears because he was touched by Depression Quest

[Jace]

This sort of analysis has actually been done in academia for a while. Fairly interesting stuff, though it is never completely reliable. And that is when so-called 'professionals' are handling the material within context, not a random application.

[Arista Shahni]

LOL

Do you already have everything thawing on dishtowels and preparing for cooking in 2 hours?  I do.

[Elmund Egivand]

I pasted the entirety of stuff I wrote (Fanfiction. Not-EVE ones. You wouldn't be interested) and it guessed rightly that I'm male. However, it also thought I'm European, which I am not. This is amusing. If I know programming I would love to crack that wide open to see how it works.

[Vikarion]

I had no idea I was a girl. I shall have to make some psychological adjustments.