A convolutional neural network approach for gender and language variety identification

Helena Gómez-Adorno, Roddy Fuentes-Alba, Ilia Markov, Grigori Sidorov, Alexander Gelbukh

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present a method for gender and language variety identification using a convolutional neural network (CNN). We compare the performance of this method with a traditional machine learning algorithm-support vector machines (SVM) trained on character n-grams (n = 3-8) and lexical features (unigrams and bigrams of words), and their combinations. We use a single multi-labeled corpus composed of news articles in different varieties of Spanish developed specifically for these tasks. We present a convolutional neural network trained on word- and sentence-level embeddings architecture that can be successfully applied to gender and language variety identification on a relatively small corpus (less than 10,000 documents). Our experiments show that the deep learning approach outperforms a traditional machine learning approach on both tasks, when named entities are present in the corpus. However, when evaluating the performance of these approaches reducing all named entities to a single symbol NE to avoid topic-dependent features, the drop in accuracy is higher for the deep learning approach.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4845-4855
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems
Volume36
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019

Keywords

  • Author profiling
  • Character n-grams
  • Convolutional neural networks
  • Deep learning
  • Gender identification
  • Language variety identification
  • Machine learning
  • Spanish

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