Ye shall Know them by their Verbs: How Gender Express their Opinion in Twitter

It is commonly said that adjectives are a kind of word that people use for emitting their opinion. This is because this lexical category designates the qualities of an entity. However, there are different ways to express an explicit opinion besides the use of adjectives. People also can choose verbs, nouns, adverbs and even groups of words that have complex meaning, like idioms or other multi-word expressions. The main purpose of this work was to discover which gender prefers which lexical category to express their opinion. In this paper, we show how sentiment analysis can help to identify a gender. A corpus of tweets was compiled for this research. The tweets were classified into ‘opinions’ and ‘no opinions’. Within the corpus, we looked at which grammatical category of word was bearing the holder’s subjectivity. We found that women used 27.98% verbs while men 16.91%, specifically psych verbs, in order to express their assessment.