Age Identification of Twitter Users: Classification Methods and Sociolinguistic Analysis

In this article, we address the problem of age identification of Twitter users, after their online text. We used a set of text mining, sociolinguistic-based and content-related text features, and we evaluated a number of well-known and widely used machine learning algorithms for classification, in order to examine their appropriateness on this task. The experimental results showed that Random Forest algorithm offered superior performance achieving accuracy equal to 61%. We ranked the classification features after their informativity, using the ReliefF algorithm, and we analyzed the results in terms of the sociolinguistic principles on age linguistic variation.