Posted on Wednesday 28 May 2003

"stylometry"

A new computer program can determine the sex of an author by detecting subtle differences in the words men and women prefer to use.

For instance, female writers tend to choose grammatical terms that apply to personal relationships, such as "for" and "with," more frequently than men do.

"Women have a more interactive style," said Shlomo Argamon, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago who developed the program. "They want to create a relationship between the writer and the reader."

Men, on the other hand, use more numbers, adjectives and determiners - words such as "the," "this" and "that" - because they apparently care more than women do about conveying specific information.

Argamon said the intent of male writers often was to say: "Here's something I want to tell you about, and here are some things about it."

Women, he found, write the pronoun "she" more often than men do, although both sexes use "he" about equally.