Try the Gender Genie

[Pure]

Hi Black,

you said,


//With all the analysing one fact still remains: the determination of the gender is not correct in a lot of cases, 40%.//

This is not correct. See the excerpt from the 2002 paper

_Automatically Categorizing Written Texts by Author Gender_

by Moshe Koppel1 Shlomo Argamon2,1 Anat Rachel Shimoni1



http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-llc-final.pdf

One of the difficulties in obtaining greater accuracy overall is the difference between fiction and nonfiction.
These differences are generally greater than the difference between male and female writing
styles and thus training on fiction and non-fiction documents together actually harms results. When we
train together, accuracy on fiction test documents is 74.5% and on non-fiction is 79.7%. When we train
only on fiction documents (thus using a substantially smaller training set), results of 36-fold crossvalidation
(maintaining ten examples per fold) actually increase to 79.5%. Likewise, when training on
non-fiction only, accuracy on non-fiction test documents increased to 82.6%.

As to your statement,
//I wager because the premisses were biased to begin with. The difference between male and female writing? Tricky, tricky, tricky.//

I'm not sure what premisses you're thinking of. The hypothesis is that there are differences. The null hypothesis is 'no differences.' The hypothesis is not an assumption or a 'premise.'
It was supported to a fair degree.

Were there in fact no differences, then the listed words would fail to discriminate at all, whereas they do so 80% of the time.

By the way, I did write to Koppel about some of these issues, and he has stated that a version of the algorithm NOT using pronouns exists, and has expressed an interest in some aspects of our discussion.

Note to Gary,
//According to Lauren's poll of who enjoys which categories, women are partial to stories of male homosexuality, that is: erotica with no female characters. So suppose you've written such a story and want to give it maximum feminine reader appeal. Gender Genie will say you haven't hit the mark because you have no feminine pronouns. To improve the story you find ways to introduce feminine pronouns.//

With all due respect, there are several mistaken assumption here, the principal one being that female authorship implies female readership, and similarly for males.

You have chosen to use the Genie to check for appeal to females, and that was never its intention. So your statement I've bolded is not accurate at all. I tried a male/male story, and the Genie assesment was 'male authored.' Period. How enjoyable the story might be to literotica women is completely irrelevant; it's solely your conclusion if you mistakenly decide that the mark was missed. Females read books they know to be male authored all the time. (Similarly for males who read, say, the Harry Potter stories.) And again a mistake--or an assumption without evidence-- that female *readership* would be increased by introducing female pronouns.

//I don't think it's worth the trouble of analysing the algorithm, unless you're a computer programmer who wants to know how it works.//

OK, that's your personal view. I find dissecting it, esp. to eliminate the weakness associated with POV, to be interesting.

Further the bigger question mentioned by Koppel, the differences between fiction and non fiction writing, is also of interest to me, since I write both, and any diffs of the Koppel type are largely due to unconscious processes.

I quote from the 2002 paper:

An interesting phenomenon that is evident in Table 3 is that the differences between male and female usages of various features parallel more extreme differences between fiction and non-fiction: determiners, which are used more by men, are used more by all authors in non-fiction; pronouns and negation, which are used more by women, are used more by all authors in fiction.

The extreme differences between fiction and non-fiction suggest that distinguishing between the two genres ought to be an easier task than distinguishing between male and female authors. And indeed it is. Using the same corpus and same learning methodology as above on the fiction/non-fiction problem, ten runs of 56-fold cross-validation yields accuracy of 98%. Table 4 shows results for each of the three feature sets.

 

[Boxlicker101]

I've been avoiding involvement in disecting the algorithm, because to me it defeats the purpose of the original posting. Gender Genie I felt is a just a quick little check one can run to give some indication of whether your copy uses language that one sex or the other will identify with. It seems to me this could help if you are aiming your story mainly at women, or mainly at men. Stop to analyse the algorithm and it's no longer a speedy check, it's a rather time consuming one. However, the statement above does point to another level of practical use.

According to Lauren's poll of who enjoys which categories, women are partial to stories of male homosexuality, that is: erotica with no female characters. So suppose you've written such a story and want to give it maximum feminine reader appeal. Gender Genie will say you haven't hit the mark because you have no feminine pronouns. To improve the story you find ways to introduce feminine pronouns.

Perhaps you describe the thoughts of one of the male characters, to reveal that he is conjuring up images of women in his mind because he's bisexual; maybe you introduce a third character, a woman who secretly watches the two men make love and herself masturbates. No matter what device you use, the theory I'm offering is that if you find ways to make the story get a feminine rating from Gender Genie then perhaps you have increased its appeal to female readers. Is it worth all the trouble? Probably not in most cases, but who knows? Maybe there are times when an individual author will see some practical value in such an exercise. Beyond that I don't think it's worth the trouble of analysing the algorithm, unless you're a computer programmer who wants to know how it works.

I have to say that I believe that I have gotten some benefit from this thread because I like to aim at female readers, and I will do so even more. I will use personal pronouns in place of articles where it will work and I will stop saying "First because ..Y.. , and second, because..Z.."and say Because ...Y... and ...Z...". That first and second thing had gotten to be a cliche, anyhow.

If a woman actually likes male homosexual stories, I would think it might be a positive thing to emphasize the maleness of them. That is, if it is a story involving only men, might that not be why she likes it, and if so, wouldn't it be a mistake to feminize it? Personally, I like lesbian stories, wither written or filmed but I have no interest at all in gay male stories of any kind. that's not homophobia either, because I am actually bisexual, although mostly straight. Maybe that's why I am inclined to write like a woman. Whatever the reason, I think of it as a good thing.

 

[Gary Chambers]

Pure,

I did say earlier in the thread that it must not be forgotten that a woman will read a well written story authored by a male, and vice versa. I do not assume that Gender Genie giving a story a female rating means it will appeal to women, but once the story is done, tickling it to make sure you are using words that seem natural to the gender of reader you're aiming at may increase its appeal still further. That seems logical to me.

There's also nothing wrong with taking an interest, whether professional or personal, in how an interesting program like Gender Genie works. My only concern was that in delving too far into the workings of the beast, it could waste a writer's time and creative energy quibbling over the exact number of gender specific pronouns, rather than creating an elegant turn of phrase. Your response indicates there isn't much danger of that in your case, because you seem to have some specific relevance for the Gender Genie in mind.

Boxlicker,

You and I seem to be in roughly the same camp on this. If you aim your work at women, I agree that it must surely be positive that the Gender Genie says you write like a woman. At the very least, I don't see how it could do much harm, and I congratulate you for being sufficiently secure in your own sexuality to take that attitude.

Pure makes the point that if the copy is plainly written by a male that may give it even more appeal to a woman who wants to read about men. It's a valid point but, of course, at some point one must simply choose one's weapon and take twenty paces. Otherwise one could could just keep begging the question forever back and forward, and never submit another story anywhere.

Frankly, I posted the Gender Genie link expecting that some might see it as a good little writing tool, and others might see it as an idle curiosity. I'm amazed at the amount of interest the thread has generated, and I'm especially gratified to learn from Pure that the programmer is actually interested in some aspects of our examination of the program.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Hi, Pure.

First, I have to say that if the Gender Genie is right 80% of the time, that means it is wrong 20% of the time, which is a lot of error.

Second, I have to agree that men will have no trouble reading books or stories by women and women will have no trouble reading books or stories by men. Mostly, it will depend on the nature of the writing. Personally, I like mystery novels, action stories, porn, science fiction and sports stories and I don't care whether men or women write them. I really enjoy a well-crafted book by Agathie Christie. I am not interested in romantic stories or historical novels unless they are based on war. It does happen that most of the fiction I like is written by men and what I don't like tends to be written by women. It isn't the gender of the writer; it's the type of story.

Third, I don't think this applies as well to porn or erotica. I believe that a sexually active man can better write about male responses because he can draw on his own experiences and a sexually active woman can write better for women for the same reason. Male reactions are more simple, visual and external so a woman can probably write better for men than a woman can.

The fourth thing is something I want to ask you. I know that you have read several passages from my stories because I have posted them and you have posted one also, on another thread and you may have read others that were not posted. So, what do you think of them, setting aside your aversion to the plethora of adjectives I favor? What I mean is, how accurately do I describe female responses? My description of male response is negligible: My cock is stiff. I stroke it in and out of her wet pussy. I cum. But, I go into great detail in describe how the women in the story react because they are the central figures in the stories, moreso than the narrator, who is only there to give them a good time. In the stories, he succeeds admirably but how well do I describe how the women feel. That is, are my descriptions wrong or are they basically correct but exaggerated? I hope it's the latter because this IS porn and is intended to arouse, not to describe accurately.

 

[Black Tulip]

The Gender Genie with which this thread started says after analyzing my stuff:

That is one butch chick. Need more proof about biased?

According to Koppel and Argamon, the algorithm should predict the gender of the author approximately 80% of the time.

Accuracy Results
Am I right?
yes 116623 (66.15%)
no 59684 (33.85%)
176307 total responses since September 13, 2003

Whether you apply this program to fiction or non-fiction you had to have material to start with. That is where my suspicion starts. What texts did they pick and how was determined which texts where valid examples of male and female writing? Or did the difference between those two came after analyzing? As a kind of bonus?

 

[Dirty Slut]

Personally, I think...

That Gender Genie is just another bull shit scheme by some inherently anal justifiable male to put women in their place. If we write as well as them then we must be a male by their own definition of each gender. What a load of tripe!

DS

 

[Black Tulip]

Re: Personally, I think...

That Gender Genie is just another bull shit scheme by some inherently anal justifiable male to put women in their place. If we write as well as them then we must be a male by their own definition of each gender. What a load of tripe!

DS

 

[Gary Chambers]

Re: Personally, I think...

That Gender Genie is just another bull shit scheme by some inherently anal justifiable male to put women in their place. If we write as well as them then we must be a male by their own definition of each gender. What a load of tripe!

DS

DAMN! The palace guards have foiled us again. Queen Estrogen's throne is secure once more. If we give you Koppel and Argamon for ritual sacrifice, will you open the drawbridge? We only want to come in for a party, honest. I know I can't write as well as a woman, but I can lick my Adam's apple.

 

[Inside_UR_Head]

After trying the gender genie numerous times I discovered I'm female. Is that right or wrong. I guess until someone guesses correctly who I am no one will ever know.

 

[Pure]

Hi Dirty S,

//another bull shit scheme by some inherently anal justifiable male to put women in their place. //

and you know this because....?

Given history of 'differences' I understand your suspicion; e.g., writings on women's physiology. In Psychology, however, I think it's clear that not all gender difference research is to put anyone down. Females have often superior verbal skills, esp.at early points in life. Males often have superior spatial abilities in certain tasks. In sex, a woman's reactions often seem to reflect global and emotional factors, as is stated in the old witticism: "Women require a reason to have sex; men require only a place." Which is not to deny that women also sometimes want the 'zipless fuck.'

Given that the main difference Koppel and his male and female associates point to., I would think women would welcome the point. Male fiction is often rather 'uninvolved', as they say, resembling non fiction in many ways. At lit you can see it in stories that whose details read like an anatomy manual. Female written fiction, e.g., the romance stories reflects an emotional and human side. As Box and Gary have pointed out, however, there's no stopping a good writer from turning out the prose more typical of the opposite gender.

This is what the author's actually say, though I suppose it could be a cloak for evil purposes

http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final.pdf

Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts [[2003]]
Shlomo Argamon a, Moshe Koppel b, Jonathan Fine c.
Anat Rachel Shimoni b

Our main interest in this paper is to present the linguistic phenomena; we will endeavor, as far as possible, to avoid baseless speculation with regard to interpretation of the data.
Nevertheless, the differences we consider between male- and female-authored documents represent related underlying phenomena. The categories of pronoun and specifier both encode
information about the "things" of the world as they are presented in nominal groups (Halliday 1994).

Pronouns send the message that the identity of the "thing" involved is known to the reader, while specifiers provide information about "things" that the writer assumes the reader does not know.

Thus, one main locus of difference between men's and women's writing is the way the people, objects, collectives and institutions are presented. In particular, since we will see that it is specifically pronouns that refer to animate "things" that are used with greater frequency in female-authored documents, our results are consistent with earlier findings that men talk more about objects, while women talk more about relationships (Aries & Johnson
1983; Tannen 1990).

 

[Pure]

Hi Black,

you ask about what texts were picked. (Do look at the whole list at the url given, also.)

From the 2002 paper already cited:

[begin verbatim excerpt]

In this paper, we employ machine learning algorithms on a
genre-controlled corpus of 566 documents taken from the British National Corpus (BNC) to construct models for performing just such a task. We show that these models classify unseen texts according to author gender with accuracy of approximately 80%.

2. The Corpus
The BNC includes 920 documents in British English that are labeled both for author gender and for genre: fiction and several non-fiction genres and sub-genres as will be shown below. All the
experiments reported in this paper were performed on a genre-controlled subset of the BNC constructed as follows: in each sub-genre, we use all the documents in the smaller (male or female) class and randomly select an equal number of documents from the other class, discarding the excess documents.

The resulting corpus contains 566 documents (a full listing of which can be found at http://shekel.jct.ac.il/~argamon/gender-style ).

No single author wrote more than three documents in this corpus. All of the non-fiction documents and 75% of the fiction documents are from the years 1975-1993; the remaining fiction documents are from the years 1960-1974. The documents contain between 554 and 61,199 words with an average of about 34,320 words each (female=34,795; male=33,845).
[end verbatim excerpt]

 

[Gary Chambers]

In sex, a woman's reactions often seem to reflect global and emotional factors, as is stated in the old witticism: "Women require a reason to have sex; men require only a place." Which is not to deny that women also sometimes want the 'zipless fuck.'[/i]

It's funny you should say that, Pure, because women keep directing me to Anne Rice as an example of a good erotica writer. I've read some Ane Rice erotica, and I do find her a very good author, but I think she tends to ramble on a little describing emotions, sensations, impressions or feelings long after the reader has received the message. This is not to say it makes her less readable and I'm not against repeating important ideas to drive them home, but I think it does perhaps make her a little more appealing to female readers than to male. I'm not about to spend time typing and pasting large blocks of Rice's copy into Gender Genie, but I can't help wondering if adjusting her language to a male rating (assuming it would currently be identified as female) might make her emotional passages more entertaining for male readers.

As for the tired old witticism, I'm going to don my men's lib hat on that one. I consider it absolute nonsense to assume that men do not want, or have no appreciation of, the bonding value of sex. The assumption is insulting. There are times when both men and women want the 'zipless fuck', but this doesn't mean that either gender is shallow in their overall sexual politic. Perpetually casting men as brainless slobs who forever want to dip their wicks in any available sheath, merely abandons truth in favour of the tiresome little girl's fanatsy that the ideal man is nothing more than a good natured Neanderthal. We know our lady friends like us to be decisive and at times single minded, so we all learn how to play that role. I assure you, however, that as the strap falls off your shoulder the kiss that replaces it is no less romantic coming from the libido of a healthy male than it would be coming from its female counterpart.

 

[Pure]

GC: //I consider it absolute nonsense to assume that men do not want, or have no appreciation of, the bonding value of sex. //

Oh, men generally appreciate the bonding value of sex, i.e., the bond of the wife to monogamy. This, of course, frees them up for the mistresses (whom men also like bonded) and passing freebies. It is said there are exceptions. Take Bill Clinton. He may well have restricted "sex" to Hillary in these last ten years**, but that depends on how you define "sex."

Oh, and this is not a blanket statement: It's like another witticism about politicians: The dishonest 99% give the other 1% a bad name.


------

**We leave aside the years before!

 

[Gary Chambers]

Loyalty

... This, of course, frees them up for the mistresses (whom men also like bonded) and passing freebies...It is said there are exceptions. Take Bill Clinton. He may well have restricted "sex" to Hillary in these last ten years, but that depends on how you define "sex."

Oh, and this is not a blanket statement: It's like another witticism about politicians: The dishonest 99% give the other 1% a bad name.

But Pure, you are merely justifying one double standard with a whole list of them? Women don't like passing freebies? Women never have affairs? Women never seduce, they are only seduced?

I have no idea whether Hillary has ever had an affair, and the only reason I know Bill had one is because North America is a puritanical society that considers it national news if any famous person has sex, in or out of wedlock. The Clintons' sex life is none of my business, and a group of erotica writers seems the last place it should be brandished as an issue of broader character. I would hope we are above that sort of madness.

Primates use sex for bonding, Pure. It's their main obsession with sex, and it isn't restricted to humans. We have bisexual jungle dwelling relatives who use it the same way, only even more frequently because they are not as inhibited and restricted as we are.

Monogamy is more a matter of social class than anything else. True aristocracy wallows in sexual freedom, with both wives and husbands taking other lovers if they please. While trailer trashies routinely berate each other in public, just for glancing at a comely member of the opposite sex. There's a whole range of types in between. Real loyalty to another demands a lot more than sexual monogamy. In fact, sex almost pales to insignificance next to other more demanding forms of loyalty, because in a more deeply loyal relationship sex is seen for what it is: a sensual bonding ritual and little more.

To spread himself into the world the man may establish bonds with a network of lovers, just like those sexy jungle beasts. If in the process he neglects or insults his wife, he reveals a poor character but not a truism of his entire gender. The myth that men are more promiscuous or shallow than women is nothing but an archaic feminine convenience, allowing a man's sex partners to plead innocence ad infinitum.

 

[Pure]

Gary, interesting posting.

In line with what you say, I remember some recent primate or anthropological research which--contrary to previous--showed the advantages of females' infidelity. Before, the males' gains were stressed. (The female's genes are passed provided the regular partner is providing for her and the child.)

Using that reliable guide to American sex habits, it's obvious from the Jerry Springer show that lots of men are unknowingly raising others' children born of their wives.

The last stats I saw said 2/3 of married men and 1/2 of married women 'cheat' (at some point).

I don't mean to diminish the decision and/or inclination of some women to 'stray'. I agree they are not victims. But as I argue below, even the 'straying' may reflect more than 'zipless fuck' in the majority of cases.

OTOH, in a pure testosterone situation, of gay males, it's pretty well known that 'monogamy' is rather uncommon-- I don't have an exact figure, I'm guessing 20%, and that ignore 'serial' approaches with high turnover, also common in the gay male community, afaik.

Now back to the original point : a woman (generally) needs a reason, a man (generally) needs a place. The frequency stats do not invalidate this point, since the *type of affair must be considered. My impression is that women are more often seeking an emotional connection (e.g., love) in an affair. Men, I believe are more often seeking sexual release. Again, to cite a reliable TV source, this is quite clear with, for example Tony Soprano (old world male).

J.

 

[Boxlicker101]

This is the most recent story I have submitted. I just sent it in a few minutes ago so it is not posted yet. The name is "I Critique Jennifer".



Words: 6743

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 9894
Male Score: 6737

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

By the way, Pure, on one of your posts you said: As Box and Gary have pointed out, however, there's no stopping a good writer from turning out the prose more typical of the opposite gender.

I hope that means you think I am a good writer because I value your opinion, at least on some things.

 

[Pure]

Hi Box,

You have possibilities in writing, imo, but I'm not sure about the will.

The categorization of your story probably reflects my posted conclusion about the Gender Genie: If a story is of a male pursuing a female, with the usual details of her state, the genie will say 'female authored' because of the 'she' and 'her' high frequencies.

 

[Black Tulip]

The Gender Genie with which this thread started says after analyzing my stuff:

That is one butch chick. Need more proof about biased?

 

[Pure]

Yes, BT, maybe we could just look at the National Enquirer or the Sunday Comics to settle the issue.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Hi Box,

You have possibilities in writing, imo, but I'm not sure about the will.

The categorization of your story probably reflects my posted conclusion about the Gender Genie: If a story is of a male pursuing a female, with the usual details of her state, the genie will say 'female authored' because of the 'she' and 'her' high frequencies.

My latest story, as of right now, has not been posted yet. I submitted it late Dec. 28. Most of my smut doesn't involve actual pursuit or seduction; they are just stories of men and women meeting for sex. The most recent story is an exception, with the woman duing the seduction, and succeeding easily. Because they are always written in the first person with the narrator being the man, most of the pronouns are feminine. I have some group sex stories with multiple men, two with three men and one woman. I haven't tried them yet; it will be interesting when I do.

If the GG is always wrong about stories written by a man in the first person and involving himself and a woman, then it is not much good.

I'm not sure about the will, either. I don't think I have the discipline to write a novel but I surprised myself when I was able to write a novella, which is classified "H", last summer.

 

[Black Tulip]

Pure,

I think you are missing the point. If a woman writes like a man than she must be a "butch chick".

That is what ticks me off here.

Not the fact that my stories qualify as male smutt. So what.

 

[sanchopanza]

I tried this gender genie and it says that everything I have written is by a woman. So I decided to test a novel on it - I tried 1000 words of Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms", result:

Female Score: 1738
Male Score: 1490

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

hmm so much for Hemingway being a manly author.

 

[bridgeburner]

Jumping the gun a bit here since I haven't read the whole thread yet. I was just kind of tickled by my results and wanted to post about them.

For my fiction submission I was about 14K Female v 10K male --- but I think this is primarily because the protagonist is female. I did a word replace for every instance of "her" changing it to "his" and the result came up male.

I thought it might be more interesting to paste one of my Literotica posts in the Genie especially since I was widely mistaken for a male when I first started actively posting here.

The results came up male by a nearly two to one margin on four different posts of over 500 words.


Maybe I really am a dude?



-B

 

[Black Tulip]

BB,

You are really asking for it: you are a butch chick!

[do not hit me, I am only quoting the Gender Genie]

 

[Gary Chambers]

Pure,

I think you are missing the point. If a woman writes like a man than she must be a "butch chick".

That is what ticks me off here.

Not the fact that my stories qualify as male smutt. So what.

Wow! This thing really has your knickers in a twist. It's okay BT, your femininity is not in question. Try thinking of yourself as a gay male trapped in a woman's body. I call myself a lesbian trapped in a man's body and it works for me. I hate to think of you sitting in the European swamp wrestling with your sexual identity; makes me wish I'd never posted the Gender Genie link. Anyway, maybe it doesn't mean you're butch. Maybe you just like to be on top sometimes.