Re:Ask HN: flirt140, how are they determining the gender?
by daveying99 on Thursday May 14, 2009 @04:57AM
(#608447)
The twitter API gives access to a large number of a user's latest tweets. So it's a series of 140 characters which makes the gender classifier more accurate.
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Re:Ask HN: flirt140, how are they determining the gender?
by kngspook on Thursday May 14, 2009 @07:56AM
(#608574)
Yeah, but the API doesn't give you access to those users' gender (since Twitter doesn't ask/store that info), which means you have no way to tell the classifier "Here are 500 males' tweets, here are 500 females' tweets."
I suppose you could manually find males and females and train based on their body of works, but it won't be great; you'll likely run into a selection bias.
But if you seeded with that approach, and then used a SpamAssassin-style auto-learner...maybe you'd have a chance?
I suppose this is a case where you don't want "Perfect" to get in the way of "Good enough", especially since it will never be perfect...