Multi-task Learning for Gender and Age Prediction on Chinese Microblog

The demographic attributes gender and age play an important role for social media applications. Previous studies on gender and age prediction mostly explore efficient features which are labor intensive. In this paper, we propose to use the multi-task convolutional neural network (MTCNN) model for predicting gender and age simultaneously on Chinese microblog. With MTCNN, we can effectively reduce the burden of feature engineering and explore common and unique representations for both tasks. Experimental results show that our method can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art baselines.