According to a report in Utne magazine, the programme:
... assesses with 80 percent accuracy whether the authors of fiction and non-fiction books are male or female, reports Phillip Ball in Nature. Patterns detected by the program include the use of pronouns, such as I, you, he, she, them (female) and words that identify and quantify nouns, like a, the, that, one, two (male). The software, developed by Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University in Israel, was designed to "identify the most prevalent fingerprints of gender and of fiction and non-fiction." These fingerprints were applied to 566 English-language works published after 1975. Two titles misidentified by gender were Possession, by A.S. Byatt and Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. "Strikingly, the distinctions between male and female writers are much the same as those that, even more clearly, differentiate non-fiction and fiction," identifying the genres themselves with 98 percent accuracy, Mr. Ball writes.80% accuracy, my foot! According to the results posted on the website, the programme is right only 58% of the time - not a great deal better than simple guesswork. And it can't be up to much if it thinks Sharanya is a bloke! I ran a couple of paragraphs of an Annie Proulx story by it, figuring if any writer has a gender ambiguous writing style it's her. The programme told me that the first paragraph I enterered was written by a female and the second by a male!
(And according to the programme the paragraph above was typed by a male. I'm off for a sex-change op!)
