A New Term Representation Method for Gender and Age Prediction

Abstract

Author Profiling is a kind of text classification method that is used for detecting the personality profiles such as age, gender, educational background, place of origin, personality traits, native language, etc., of authors by processing their written texts. Several applications like forensic analysis, security and marking are used the techniques of author profiling for finding the basic details of authors. The main problem in the domain of author profiling is preparation of suitable dataset for predicting the characteristics of authors. PAN is one organization conducting competitions on various types of shared tasks. In 2013, PAN organizers presented the task of author profiling in their series of competitions and continued this task in further years. They arranged different kinds of datasets in different varieties of languages. From 2013 onwards several researchers proposed solutions for author profiling to predict different personality features of authors by utilizing the datasets provided in PAN competitions. Researchers used different kinds of features like character based, lexical or word based, structural features, syntactic, content based, style based features for distinguishing the author’s writing styles in their texts. Most of the researchers observed that the content based features like words or phrases those are used in the text are most useful for detecting the personality features of authors. In this work, the experiment conducted with the content based features like most important words or terms for predicting age group and gender from the PAN competition datasets. Two datasets such as PAN 2014 and 2016 author profiling datasets are used in this experiment. The documents of dataset are converted in to a vector representation which is a suitable format for giving training to machine learning algorithms. The term representation in a document vector plays a crucial role to improve the performance of gender and age group prediction.The Term Weight Measures (TWMs) are such techniques used for this purpose to represent the significance of a term value in document vector representation. In this work, we developed a new TWM for representing the term value in document vector representation. The proposed TWM’s efficiency is compared with the efficiency of other existing TWMs. Two Machine Learning (ML) algorithms like SVM (Support Vector Machine) and RF (Random Forest) are considered in this experiment for estimating the accuracy of proposed approach. We recognized that the proposed TWM accomplished best accuracies for gender and age prediction in two PAN Datasets.