ArabGend: Gender Analysis and Inference on Arabic Twitter
This addresses the problem of limited gender analysis tools for Arabic social media, providing insights into socio-cultural differences and a practical inference method, though it is incremental as it applies existing techniques to a new language domain.
The paper tackled the lack of gender analysis and inference for Arabic Twitter by conducting an extensive analysis of differences between male and female users and proposing a gender inference method, achieving an F1 score of 82.1%, which is 47.3% higher than a majority baseline.
Gender analysis of Twitter can reveal important socio-cultural differences between male and female users. There has been a significant effort to analyze and automatically infer gender in the past for most widely spoken languages' content, however, to our knowledge very limited work has been done for Arabic. In this paper, we perform an extensive analysis of differences between male and female users on the Arabic Twitter-sphere. We study differences in user engagement, topics of interest, and the gender gap in professions. Along with gender analysis, we also propose a method to infer gender by utilizing usernames, profile pictures, tweets, and networks of friends. In order to do so, we manually annotated gender and locations for ~166K Twitter accounts associated with ~92K user location, which we plan to make publicly available at http://anonymous.com. Our proposed gender inference method achieve an F1 score of 82.1%, which is 47.3% higher than majority baseline. In addition, we also developed a demo and made it publicly available.