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Seska
05-29-2003, 07:07 PM
http://sify.com/news/scienceandmedicine/fullstory.php?id=13158203


Wednesday, 28 May , 2003, 00:59

Sydney: By noting the subtle differences in the words used by men and women, a new computer programme identifies the sex of an author.
"Women have a more interactive style," said Shlomo Argamon, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago who developed the programme.

"They want to create a relationship between the writer and the reader."

According to a report in The Age, the programme correctly determined the sex of the author in 80 per cent of the works it checked. However it missed A.S. Byatt's best-selling novel, "Possession" as also Michael Frayn's science fiction tale, "A Landing on the Sun".

Argamon's gender programme is part of a much broader technique called "stylometry," which analyses styles not only of writing, but also of music, graphics, art and architecture.

Along with fellow-researchers Moshe Koppel and Anat Shimoni, Argamon published a report on their work in the April edition of the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing.

For years, scholars have debated whether William Shakespeare wrote a 17th-century play called "Two Noble Kinsmen". "These computer techniques may eventually be able to provide us with answers to these kinds of questions," Argamon said. ANI

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Guess its time to take out the S in ASL!