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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Monday, July 07, 2003
This must qualify as one of the most irritating pieces I've read in a long while; concerning a computer algorithm that can examine an anonymous text and determine, with accuracy rates of better than 80 percent, whether the author is male or female:"The single biggest difference is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns-''I'', ''you'', ''she'', ''myself'', or ''yourself'' and the like. Men, in contrast, are more likely to use determiners-''a,'' ''the,'' ''that,'' and ''these''-as well as cardinal numbers and quantifiers like ''more'' or ''some.'' As one of the papers published by Koppel's group notes, men are also more likely to use ''post-head noun modification with an of phrase''-phrases like ''garden of roses.''"
As it acknowledges, the only thing that is novel here is the predictive capability, but quite why the author feels this to be controversial when feminist academics have been documenting gender distinctions in written and spoken language for decades. Much of the framing of the piece implies that such differences must be innate, reading like an evolutionary psychology paper discussing the results of PET scans. That may be the case, but there's nothing in this research that couldn't be attributable to differences emerging from socialisation; it is entirely correct to observe that social performance is an equally valid explanation, as is the notion that greater pronoun use may be indicative of a greater attempt to write about people and to forge intimate connections with readers.Labels: Language
posted by Richard 10:43 am
