Detecting Latent User Properties in Social Media

The ability to identify user attributes such as gender, age, regional origin, and political orientation solely from user language in social media such as Twitter or similar highly informal content has important applications in advertising, personalization, and recommendation. This paper includes a novel investigation of stacked-SVM-based classification algorithms over a rich set of original features, applied to classifying these four user attributes. We propose new sociolinguisticsbased features for classifying user attributes in Twitter-style informal written genres, as distinct from the other primarily spoken genres previously studied in the user-property classification literature. Our models, singly and in ensemble, significantly outperform baseline models in all cases.