The Gender Genie continues to spark interest, and I have just read one of the best blog posts I've seen about it on Customer Experience Crossroads.
Most of the time, people drop their writing into it and, when they don't get the result they expect, declare it to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet, a lot of its users still find it and its analysis to be a fun time waster. Despite having written the program, I didn't come up with the algorithm and believe that the Genie works no better than the flip of a coin. However, I don't think it to be a complete time waster since there actually is some academic study that went into it.
In the most basic terms, the computational linguists behind the algorithm, Koppel and Argamon, took a bunch of fiction and looked for trends based on gender. Using complicated formulas, they determined that male writers tended to write more about specific things like an apple, a book, or the car. In contrast, female writers wrote about connections to things like my apple, your book, or our car. The nouns themselves (apple, book, car) didn't matter much but the preceding qualifier, whether an article (a, an, the) or possessive (my, your, our), did.
Although I think you really can't figure out whether a writer is male or female based on writing, I still believe that the linguists' algorithm has useful applications. I have received emails from several authors saying that they have used it to help make their female characters come across as being more female and vice versa. Now, Customer Experience Crossroads sees it as another tool for tailoring marketing to target market: "We don't all communicate in the same way. Worth considering when you think about customer experience."
