Gender Classification of Blog Authors: With Feature Engineering and Deep Learning using LSTM Networks

In this paper, we present two approaches to automatically classify the gender of blog authors: the first is a manual feature extraction based system incorporating two novel feature classes: variable length character sequence patterns and thirteen new word classes, along with an added class of surface features while the second is a first-ever application of a memory variant of Recurrent Neural Networks, i.e. Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory Networks (BLSTMs) on this task. We use two blog data sets to report our results: the first is a well-explored one used by the previous state-of-the-art model while the other is a 20 times larger corpus. For the first system, we use a voting of machine learning classifiers to obtain an improved accuracy with respect to the previous feature mining systems on the former data set. Using our second approach, we show that the accuracy obtained using such deep LSTMs is comparable to the current state-of-the-art deep learning system for the task of gender classification. Finally, we carry out a comparative study of performance of both the systems on the two data sets.