CAPS: A Cross-genre Author Profiling System

This paper describes the participation of the Cross-genre Author Profiling System (CAPS) in the PAN16 shared task [15]. The classification system considers parts-of-speech, collocations, connective words and various other stylometric features to differentiate between the writing styles of male and female authors as well as between different age groups. The system achieves the second best score – 74.36% accuracy (with the best performing system (BPS) reaching 75.64%) for gender identification on the official test set (test set 2) for English. Further, for age classification, we report accuracy of 44.87% (BPS: 58.97%). For Spanish, CAPS reaches performance of 62.50% (BPS: 73.21%) for gender and 46.43% (BPS: 51.79) for age, while for Dutch, the accuracy for gender (the task did not target age) is lowest – 55.00% (BPS: 61.80%). For comparison, we also tested CAPS on single genre classification of author gender and age on the PAN14 and PAN15 datasets achieving comparable performance.