{"id":1310,"date":"2003-07-19T17:43:26","date_gmt":"2003-07-20T00:43:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/07\/19\/1310.html"},"modified":"2003-07-19T17:43:26","modified_gmt":"2003-07-20T00:43:26","slug":"computer-can-determine-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/07\/19\/computer-can-determine-author\/","title":{"rendered":"Computer can determine author sex?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Interesting item in <cite>Nature:<\/cite> \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nsu\/030714\/030714-13.html\">Computer program detects author gender<\/a>.\"  Claim is that \"[the] simple scan of key words and syntax is around 80% accurate on both fiction and non-fiction\" in distinguishing male authors from female authors.<\/p>\n<p>I'm immediately dubious, of course; that 20% is too big a chunk to ignore.  Still, their generalities about writing by male and female authors are interesting if taken as generalities rather than as Universal Truths.<\/p>\n<p>Among the books misclassified: <cite>Possession<\/cite> and <cite>Remains of the Day.<\/cite>  I'd love to give them some Tiptree.  And perhaps Raphael Carter's \"Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation.\"<\/p>\n<p>Also interesting: they claim their software can distinguish fiction from nonfiction with 98% accuracy.  That's pretty cool&#8212;I wonder how they've classified the <cite>Weekly World News.<\/cite><\/p>\n<p>(Okay, I know, that was a cheap shot.  They presumably mean something like \"book-length material published by a major publisher as nonfiction\" vs the same with fiction.  Still, the claim sets up a dichotomy that I don't think is justified.  Where does memoir fit?  What about fictional memoir?  What about creative nonfiction?  What about epistolary novels containing news clippings?  And are books of mythology fiction or nonfiction?)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Interesting item in Nature: &#8220;Computer program detects author gender.&#8221; Claim is that &#8220;[the] simple scan of key words and syntax&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-language"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}