A quantitative analysis of lexical differences between genders in telephone conversations

This work employs machine learning techniques to automatically categorize the gender of each speaker given only the transcript of his/her speech, achieving 92% accuracy, and presents an analysis of the most characteristic words for each gender.

Abstract

In this work, we provide an empirical analysis of differences in word use between genders in telephone conversations, which complements the considerable body of work in sociolinguistics concerned with gender linguistic differences. Experiments are performed on a large speech corpus of roughly 12000 conversations. We employ machine learning techniques to automatically categorize the gender of each speaker given only the transcript of his/her speech, achieving 92% accuracy. An analysis of the most characteristic words for each gender is also presented. Experiments reveal that the gender of one conversation side influences lexical use of the other side. A surprising result is that we were able to classify male-only vs. female-only conversations with almost perfect accuracy.