Improving Gender Classification of Blog Authors

The problem of automatically classifying the gender of a blog author has important applications in many commercial domains. Existing systems mainly use features such as words, word classes, and POS (part-ofspeech) n-grams, for classification learning. In this paper, we propose two new techniques to improve the current result. The first technique introduces a new class of features which are variable length POS sequence patterns mined from the training data using a sequence pattern mining algorithm. The second technique is a new feature selection method which is based on an ensemble of several feature selection criteria and approaches. Empirical evaluation using a real-life blog data set shows that these two techniques improve the classification accuracy of the current state-ofthe-art methods significantly.