A Word Embeddings based Approach for Author Profiling: Gender and Age Prediction

Author Profiling (AP) is a method of identifying the demographic profiles such as age, gender, location, native language and personality traits of an author by processing their written texts. The AP techniques are used in multiple applications such as literary research, marketing, forensics and security. The researchers identified various differences in the authors writing styles by analysing various datasets. The differences in writing styles are represented as stylistic features. The researchers extracted several style based features like structural, content, word, character, syntactic, readability and semantic features to recognize the profiles of the authors. Traditionally, the researchers extracted various feature combinations for differentiating the profiles of authors. Several existing works are used Machine Learning (ML) methods for predicting the author characteristics of a new author. The existing works achieved good accuracies for predicting the author characteristics by considering the both stylistic features and ML algorithms combination. Recently, in advent of Deep Learning (DL) techniques the researchers are proposed approaches to author profiling by using these techniques. Few researchers identified that the deep learning techniques performance is good for author profiles prediction than the results of style based features. In this work, a word embeddings based approach is proposed for gender and age prediction. In this approach, the experiment conducted with different word embedding models such as Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText and BERT for generating word vectors for words. The documents are converted as vectors by using the document representation technique which uses the word embeddings of words. The document vectors are transferred to three different ML algorithms such as Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Random Forest (RF) and Logistic Regression (LR) for generating the trained model. This model is used for predicating the accuracy of age and gender prediction. The XGBoost classifier with word embeddings of BERT achieved good accuracies for age and gender prediction than other word embeddings and ML algorithms. The experiment implemented on PAN 2014 competition Reviews dataset for age and gender prediction. The proposed approach attained best accuracies for predicting age and gender than the performances of various existing approaches proposed for AP