Wednesday 10 December 2008

Written By A Male Performer

As many of you know my work is in natural language processing (mainly information extraction) and so I'm often interested in new language tools or new uses for old tools.

The other day I came across uClassify which is a free web based service for doing text classification. I haven't actually tried the service yet but I did have a brief play with a few of the sites using uClassify to classify blogs; GenderAnalyzer and Typealyzer.

Unsurprisingly, given it's name, GenderAnalyzer tries to determine the gender of the blogs author while Typealyzer tries to determine the authors personality.

At the time of writing GenderAnalyzer was 90% confident that I was male so that's alright. Typealyzer decided that I was ESFP -- The Performers. I have no clue as to personality tests but they give this description:
The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.
I'm not entirely sure that is accurate, although they do state that writing style on a blog may have little or nothing to do with a person´s self-perceived personality.
11 December 2008 at 05:47 , Scriptor Senex said...

As you know I have a number of blogs - I haven't tried the gender one but I tried the other (or something similar) and ended up with four different personality types. Not sure whether that says something about the analysers or about me!

11 December 2008 at 16:03 , Helen said...

I too tried 3 of my blogs and came out as a performer, a doer and a mechanic.

15 December 2008 at 12:01 , GB alias L'homme bizarre avec la barbe grise said...

So far as A Hebridean in New Zealand is concerned I'm a female doer. Well I accept that I'm a doer but how does it know that I'm having female hormone implants?

15 December 2008 at 12:05 , GB alias L'homme bizarre avec la barbe grise said...

As far as Eagleton Notes is concerned I'm a female performer. At least it's consistent in predicting my gender (although I have doubts as to its accuracy).

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