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Detecting Gender by Full Name: Experiments with the Russian Language

Conference paper
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Part of the Communications in Computer and Information Science book series (CCIS, volume 436)

Abstract

This paper describes a method that detects gender of a person by his/her full name. While some approaches were proposed for English language, little has been done so far for Russian. We fill this gap and present a large-scale experiment on a dataset of 100,000 Russian full names from Facebook. Our method is based on three types of features (word endings, character \(n\)-grams and dictionary of names) combined within a linear supervised model. Experiments show that the proposed simple and computationally efficient approach yields excellent results achieving accuracy up to 96 %.

Keywords

Gender detection Short text classification 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Digital Society Laboratory LLC. We thank Kirill Shileev, Segei Objedkov and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments that significantly improved quality of this paper.

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© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Digital Society Laboratory LLCMoscowRussia
  2. 2.Université catholique de LouvainLouvain-la-NeuveBelgium

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