This paper describes our approach for the Author Profiling Shared Task at PAN 2017. The goal was to classify the gender and language variety of a Twitter user solely by their tweets. Author Profiling can be applied in various fields like marketing, security and forensics. Twitter already uses similar techniques to deliver personalized advertisement for their users. PAN 2017 provided a corpus for this purpose in the languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic.
To solve the problem we used a deep learning approach, which has shown recent success in Natural Language Processing. Our submitted model consists of a bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network implemented with a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) combined with an Attention Mechanism. We achieved an average accuracy over all languages of 75,31% in gender classification and 85,22% in language variety classification
