Say It with Colors: Language-Independent Gender Classification on Twitter

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have spread at stunning speed over the past decade. They are now a part of the lives of dozens of millions of people. The onset of OSNs has stretched the traditional notion of community to include groups of people who have never met in person but communicate with each other through OSNs to share knowledge, opinions, interests and activities. Here we explore in depth language independent gender classification. Our approach predicts gender using five color-based features extracted from Twitter profiles such as the background color in a user's profile page. This is in contrast with most existing methods for gender prediction that are language dependent. Those methods use high-dimensional spaces consisting of unique words extracted from such text fields as postings, user names, and profile descriptions. Our approach is independent of the user's language, efficient, scalable, and computationally tractable, while attaining a good level of accuracy.