I actually ran this experiment already for a dating app concept, using some established research on gender detection based on writing (against at least 10-20 tweets) combined with a database of female names for user names. I also tried running this on an ANN but that wasn't fruitful and required me to build a custom application to plunk through piles of public timeline users "verifying" genderness.
But yes, it's possible and yes, it works pretty well, especially if the user filled in their profile and has a decent number of updates. On Apr 2, 2:18 pm, Zac Bowling <[email protected]> wrote: > That would be an interesting challenge. > > Now this would only work with active users and for English users but > you could mine out probability index of gender using other data around > the user. > > Basically you could search back on someone's tweets for keywords that > allude you to gender. Like someone saying "Us girls have it hard." you > could assume a high chance of being female. You could also use the > search api and look of people talking about the subject in the third > person and you are likely to find the pronouns "he" or "she". For > example coming across a tweet like "I love @zbowling. He is awesome.". > Other ideas are looking for other gender specific words like "my > beard" or "my bra" . > > Then you might have the privacy advocates (big brother conspiracy > nuts) crying fowl though and gender bombing twitter if you release > such a service. > > Zac Bowlinghttp://twitter.com/zbowling > > On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 9:28 AM, [email protected] <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > As the subject line implies, I need to know how to programmatically > > determine the sex of a profile owner with the API. Is this supported, > > in any way at all? Not the sex of the person logged in as the app, but > > the owners of the profiles in a search, for example.
