Thailand

Authorship Profiling (AP) aims to predict the demographic attributes (such as gender and age) of authors based on their writing styles. Ever-improving models mean that this task is gaining interest and application possibilities. However, with greater use also comes the risk that authors are misclassified more frequently, and it remains unclear to what extent the better models can capture the bias and who is affected by the models&#39; mistakes. In this paper, we investigate three established datasets for AP as well as classical and neural classifiers for this task. Our analyses show that it is often possible to predict the demographic information of the authors based on textual features. However, some features learned by the models are specific to datasets. Moreover, models are prone to errors based on stereotypes associated with topical bias.

ACL 2024

What Can Go Wrong in Authorship Profiling: Cross-Domain Analysis of Gender and Age Prediction

demographic prediction

authorship profiling

gender bias

natural language processing

Authorship Profiling (AP) aims to predict the demographic attributes (such as gender and age) of authors based on their writing styles. Ever-improving models mean that this task is gaining interest and application possibilities. However, with greater use also comes the risk that authors are misclassified more frequently, and it remains unclear to what extent the better models can capture the bias and who is affected by the models' mistakes. In this paper, we investigate three established datasets for AP as well as classical and neural classifiers for this task. Our analyses show that it is often possible to predict the demographic information of the authors based on textual features. However, some features learned by the models are specific to datasets. Moreover, models are prone to errors based on stereotypes associated with topical bias.

workshop paper

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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What Can Go Wrong in Authorship Profiling: Cross-Domain Analysis of Gender and Age Prediction

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