Tag: internet linguistics

Are emoji sequences as informative as text?

~ Rachael Tatman ~ Leave a comment

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how much information we really convey with emoji. I was recently at the 1​st​ International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media and one theme that stood out to me from the papers was that emoji tend to be used more to communicate social meaning (things like tone and when a conversation is over) than semantics (content stuff like “this is a dog” or “an icecream truck”).

I’ve been itching to apply an information theoretic approach to emoji use for a while, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Information theory is the study of storing, transmitting and, most importantly for this project, quantifying information. In other words, using an information theoretic approach we can actually look at two input texts and figure out which one has more information in it. And that’s just what we’re going to do: we’re going to use a measure called “entropy” to directly compare the amount of information in text and emoji.

What’s entropy?

Shannon entropy is a measure of how much information there is in a sequence. Higher entropy means that there’s more uncertainty about what comes next, while lower entropy means there’s less uncertainty.  (Mathematically, entropy is always less than or the same as log2(n), where n is the total number of unique characters. You can learn more about calculating entropy and play around with an interactive calculator here if you’re curious.)

So if you have a string of text that’s just one character repeated over and over (like this: 💀💀💀💀💀) you don’t need a lot of extra information to know what the next character will be: it will always be the same thing. So the string “💀💀💀💀💀” has a very low entropy. In this case it’s actually 0, which means that if you’re going through the string and predicting what comes next, you’re always going to be able to guess what comes next becuase it’s always the same thing. On the other hand, if you have a string that’s made up of four different characters, all of which are equally probable (like this:♢♡♧♤♡♧♤♢), then you’ll have an entropy of 2.

TL;DR: The higher the entropy of a string the more information is in it.

Experiment

Hypothesis

We do have some theoretical maximums for the entropy text and emoji. For text, if the text string is just randomly drawn from the 128 ASCII characters (which isn’t how language works, but this is just an approximation) our entropy would be 7. On the other hand, for emoji, if people are just randomly using any emoji they like from the set of emoji as of June 2017, then we’d expect to see an entropy of around 11.

So if people are just  using letters or emoji randomly, then text should have lower entropy than emoji. However, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. My hypothesis, based on the amount of repetition in emoji, was that emoji should have lower entropy, i.e. less information, than text.

Data

To get emoji and text spans for our experiment I used four different datasets: three from Twitter and one from YouTube.

I used multiple datasets for a couple reasons. First, becuase I wanted a really large dataset of tweets with emoji, and since only between 0.9% and 0.5% of tweets from each Twitter dataset actually contained emoji I needed to case a wide net. And, second, because I’m growing increasingly concerned about genre effects in NLP research. (Like, a lot of our research is on Twitter data. Which is fine, but I’m worried that we’re narrowing the potential applications of our research becuase of it.) It’s the second reason that led me to include YouTube data. I used Twitter data for my initial exploration and then used the YouTube data to validate my findings.

For each dataset, I grabbed all adjacent emoji from a tweet and stored them separately. So this tweet:

Love going to ballgames! ⚾🌭 Going home to work in my garden now, tho 🌸🌸🌸🌸

Has two spans in it:

Span 1:  ⚾🌭

Span 2: 🌸🌸🌸🌸

All told, I ended up with 13,825 tweets with emoji and 18,717 emoji spans of which only 4,713 were longer than one emoji. (I ignored all the emoji spans of length one, since they’ll always have an entropy of 0 and aren’t that interesting to me.) For the YouTube comments, I ended up with 88,629 comments with emoji, 115,707 emoji spans and 47,138 spans with a length greater than one.

In order to look at text as parallel as possible to my emoji spans, I grabbed tweets & YouTube comments without emoji. For each genre, I took a number of texts equal to the number of spans of length > 1 and then calculated the character-level entropy for the emoji spans and the texts.

 

Analysis

First, let’s look at Tweets. Here’s the density (it’s like a smooth histogram, where the area under the curve is always equal to 1 for each group) of the entropy of an equivalent number of emoji spans and tweets.

download (6)
Text has a much high character-level entropy than emoji. For text, the mean and median entropy are both around 5. For emoji, there is a multimodal distribution, with the median entropy being 0 and also clusters around 1 and 1.5.

It looks like my hypothesis was right! At least in tweets, text has much more information than emoji. In fact, the most common entropy for an emoji span is 0: which means that most emoji spans with a length greater than one are just repititons of the same emoji over and over again.

But is this just true on Twitter, or does it extend to YouTube comments as well?

download (5)
The pattern for emoji & text in YouTube comments is very similar to that for Tweets. The biggest difference is that it looks like there’s less information in YouTube Comments that are text-based; they have a mean and median entropy closer to 4 than 5.

The YouTube data, which we have almost ten times more of, corroborates the earlier finding: emoji spans are less informative, and more repetitive, than text.

Which emoji were repeated the most/least often?

Just in case you were wondering, the emoji most likely to be repeated was the skull emoji, 💀. It’s generally used to convey strong negative emotion, especially embarrassment, awkwardness or speechlessness, similar to “ded“.

The least likely was the right-pointing arrow (▶️), which is usually used in front of links to videos.

More info & further work

If you’re interested, the code for my analysis is available here. I also did some of this work as live coding, which you can follow along with on YouTube here.

For future work, I’m planning on looking at which kinds of emoji are more likely to be repeated. My intuition is that gestural emoji (so anything with a hand or face) are more likely to be repeated than other types of emoji–which would definitely add some fuel to the “are emoji words or gestures” debate!

How do we use emoji?

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

Those of you who know me may know that I’m a big fan of emoji. I’m also a big fan of linguistics and NLP, so, naturally, I’m very curious about the linguistic roles of emoji. Since I figured some of you might also be curious, I’ve pulled together a discussion of some of the very serious scholarly research on emoji. In particular, I’m going to talk about five recent papers that explore the exact linguistic nature of these symbols: what are they and how do we use them?

Twemoji2 1f913
Emoji are more than just cute pictures! They play a set of very specific linguistic roles.

Dürscheid & Siever, 2017:

This paper makes one overarching point: emoji are not words. They cannot be unambiguously interpreted without supporting text and they do not have clear syntactic relationships to one another. Rather, the authors consider emoji to be specialized characters, and place them within Gallmann’s 1985 hierarchy of graphical signs. The authors show that emoji can play a range of roles within the Gallmann’s functional classification.

  • Allography: using emoji to replace specific characters (for example: the word “emoji” written as “em😝ji”)
  • Ideograms: using emoji to replace a specific word (example: “I’m travelling by 🚘” to mean “I’m travelling by car”)
  • Border and Sentence Intention signals: using emoji both to clarify the tone of the preceding sentence and also to show that the sentence is over, often replacing the final punctuation marks.

Based on an analysis of a Swiss German Whatsapp corpus, the authors conclude that the final category is far and away the most popular, and that emoji rarely replace any part of the lexical parts of a message.

Na’aman et al, 2017:

Na’aman and co-authors also develop a hierarchy of emoji usage, with three top-level categories: Function, Content (both of which would fall under mostly under the ideogram category in Dürscheid & Siever’s classifications) and Multimodal.

  • Function: Emoji replacing function words, including prepositions, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, determinatives and punctuation. An example of this category would be “I like 🍩 you”, to be read as “I do not like you”.
  • Content: Emoji replacing content words and phrases, including nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. An example of this would be “The 🔑 to success”, to be read as “the key to success”.
  • Multimodal: These emoji “enrich a grammatically-complete text with markers of
    affect or stance”. These would fall under the category of border signals in Dürscheid & Siever’s framework, but Na’aman et all further divide these into four categories: attitude, topic, gesture and other.

Based on analysis of a Twitter corpus made of up of only tweets containing emoji, the authors find that multimodal emoji encoding attitude are far and away the most common, making up over 50% of the emoji spans in their corpus. The next most common uses of emoji are to multimodal:topic and multimodal:gesture. Together, these three categories account for close to 90% of the all the emoji use in the corpus, corroborating the findings of Dürscheid & Siever.

Wood & Ruder, 2016:

Wood and Ruder provide further evidence that emoji are used to express emotion (or “attitude”, in Na’aman et al’s terms). They found a strong correlation between the presence of emoji that they had previously determined were associated with a particular emotion, like 😂 for joy or 😭 for sadness, and human annotations of the emotion expressed in those tweets. In addition, an emotion classifier using only emoji as input performed similarly to one trained using n-grams excluding emoji. This provides evidence that there is an established relationship between specific emoji use and expressing emotion.

Donato & Paggio, 2017:

However, the relationship between text and emoji may not always be so close. Donato & Paggio collected a corpus of tweets which contained at least one emoji and that were hand-annotated for whether the emoji was redundant given the text of the tweet.  For example, “We’ll always have Beer. I’ll see to it. I got your back on that one. 🍺” would be redundant, while “Hopin for the best 🎓” would not be, since the beer emoji expresses content already expressed in the tweet, while the motorboard adds new information (that the person is hoping to graduate, perhaps). The majority of emoji, close to 60%, were found not to be redundant and added new information to the tweet.

However, the corpus was intentionally balanced between ten topic areas, of which only one was feelings, and as a result the majority of feeling-related tweets were excluded from analysis. Based on this analysis and Wood and Ruder’s work, we might hypothesize that feelings-related emoji may be more redundant than other emoji from other semantic categories.

Barbieri et al, 2017:

Additional evidence for the idea that emoji, especially those that show emotion, are predictable given the text surrounding them comes from Barbieri et al. In their task, they removed the emoji from a thousand tweets that contained one of the following five emoji: 😂, ❤️, 😍, 💯 or 🔥. These emoji were selected since they were the most common in the larger dataset of half a million tweets. Then then asked human crowd workers to fill in the missing emoji given the text of the tweet, and trained a character-level bidirectional LSTM to do the same task. Both humans and the LSTM performed well over chance, with an F1 score of 0.50 for the humans and 0.65 for the LSTM.

So that was a lot of papers and results I just threw at you. What’s the big picture? There are two main points I want you to take away from this post:

  • People mostly use emoji to express emotion. You’ll see people playing around more than that, sure, but by far the most common use is to make sure people know what emotion you’re expressing with a specific message.
  • Emoji, particularly emoji that are used to represent emotions, are predictable given the text of the message. It’s pretty rare for us to actually use emoji to introduce new information, and we generally only do that when we’re using emoji that have a specific, transparent meaning.

If you’re interested in reading more, here are all the papers I mentioned in this post:

Bibliography:

Barbieri, F., Ballesteros, M., & Saggion, H. (2017). Are Emojis Predictable? EACL.

Donato, G., & Paggio, P. (2017). Investigating Redundancy in Emoji Use: Study on a Twitter Based Corpus. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (pp. 118-126).

Dürscheid, C., & Siever, C. M. (2017). Beyond the Alphabet–Communication of Emojis. Kurzfassung eines (auf Deutsch) zur Publikation eingereichten Manuskripts.

Gallmann, P. (1985). Graphische Elemente der geschriebenen Sprache. Grundlagen für eine Reform der Orthographie. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Na’aman, N., Provenza, H., & Montoya, O. (2017). Varying Linguistic Purposes of Emoji in (Twitter) Context. In Proceedings of ACL 2017, Student Research Workshop (pp. 136-141).

Wood, I. & Ruder, S. (2016). Emoji as Emotion Tags for Tweets. Sánchez-Rada, J. F., & Schuller, B (Eds.). In Proceedings of LREC 2016, Workshop on Emotion and Sentiment Analysis (pp. 76-80).

Can your use of capitalization reveal your political affiliation?

~ Rachael Tatman ~ Leave a comment

This week, I’m in Vancouver this week for the meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. (On the subject of conferences, don’t forget that my offer to help linguistics students from underrepresented minorities with the cost of conferences still stands!) The work I’m presenting is on a new research direction I’m pursuing and I wanted to share it with y’all!

If you’ve read some of my other posts on sociolinguistics, you may remember that the one of its central ideas is that certain types of language usage pattern together with aspects of people’s social identities. In the US, for example, calling a group of people “yinz” is associated with being from Pittsburgh. Or in Spanish, replacing certain “s” sounds with “th” sounds is associated with being from northern or central Spain. When a particular linguistic form is associated with a specific part of someone’s social identity, we call that a “sociolinguistic variable”

There’s been a lot of work on the type of sociolinguistic variables people use when they’re speaking, but there’s been less work on what people do when they’re writing. And this does make a certain amount of sense: many sociolinguistic variables are either 1) something people aren’t aware they’re doing or 2) something that they’re aware they’re doing but might not consider “proper”. As a result, they tend not to show up in formal writing.

This is where the computational linguistics part comes in; people do a lot of informal writing on computers, especially on the internet. In fact, I’d wager that humans are producing more text now than at any other point in history, and a lot of it is produced in public places. That lets us look for sociolinguistics variables in writing in a way that wasn’t really possible before.

Which is a whole lot of background to be able to say: I’m looking at how punctuation and capitalization pattern with political affiliation on Twitter.

Political affiliation is something that other sociolinguists have definitely looked at. It’s also something that’s very, very noticeable on Twitter these days. This is actually a boon to this type of research. One of the hard things about doing research on Twitter is that you don’t always necessarily know someone’s social identity. And if you use a linguistic feature to try to figure out their identity when what you’re interested in is linguistic features, you quickly end up with the problem of circular logic.

Accounts which are politically active, however, will often explicitly state their political affiliation in their Twitter bio. And I used that information to get tweets from people I was very sure had a specific political affiliation.

For this project, I looked at people who use the hashtags #MAGA and #theResistance in their Twitter bios. The former is an initialism for “Make America Great Again” and is used by politically conservative folks who support President Trump. The latter is used by political liberal folks who are explicitly opposed to President Trump. These two groups not only have different political identities, but also are directly opposed to each other. This means there’s good reason to believe that they will use language in different ways that reflect that identity.

But what about the linguistic half of the equation? Punctuation and capitalization are especially interesting to me because they seem to be capturing some of the same information we might find in prosody or intonation in spoken language. Things like YELLING or…pausing….or… uncertainty?  They’re also much, much easier to measure punctuation than intonation, which is notoriously difficult and time-consuming to annotate.  At the same time, I have good evidence that how you use punctuation and capitalization has some social meaning. Check out this tweet, for example:

0b1022106daeb0d0419263dcf9c5aa93--this-is-me-posts
As this tweet shows, putting a capital letter at the beginning of a tweet is anything but “aloof and uninterested yet woke and humorous”.

So, if punctuation and capitalization are doing something socially, is part of what they’re doing expressing political affiliation?

That’s what I looked into. I grabbed up to 100 tweets each from accounts which used either #MAGA or #theResistance in their Twitter bios. Then I looked at how much punctuation and capitalization users from these two groups used in their tweets.

Punctuation

First, I looked at all punctuation marks. I did find that, on average, liberal users tended to use less punctuation. But when I took a closer look at the data, an interesting pattern emerged. In both the liberal and conservative groups, there were two clusters of users: those who used a lot of punctuation and those who used almost none.

punctuation
Politically liberal users on average tended to use less punctuation than politically conservative users, but in both groups there’s really two sets of users: those who use a lot of punctuation and those who use basically  none. There just happen to be more of the latter in #theResistance.

What gives rise to these two clusters? I honestly don’t know, but I do have a hypothesis. I think that there’s  probably a second social variable in this data that I wasn’t able to control for. It seems likely that the user’s age might have something to do with it, or their education level, or even whether they use thier Twitter account for professional or personal communication.

Capitalization

My intuition that there’s a second latent variable at work in this data is even stronger given the results for the amount of capitalization folks used. Conservative users tended to use more capitalization than the average liberal user, but there was a really strong bi-modal distribution for the liberal accounts.

Rplot
Again, we see that conservative accounts use more of the marker (in this case capitalization), but that there’s a strong bi-modal distribution in the liberal users’ data.

What’s more, the liberal accounts that used a lot of punctuation also tended to use a lot of capitalization. Since these features are both ones that I associate with very “proper” usage (things like always starting a tweet with a capital letter, and ending it with a period) this seems to suggest that some liberal accounts are very standardized in their use of language, while others reject at least some of those standards.

So what’s the answer the question I posed in the title? Can capitalization or punctuation reveal political affiliation? For now, I’m going to go with a solid “maybe”. Users who use very little capitalization and punctuation are more likely to be liberal… but so are users who use a lot of both. And, while I’m on the subject of caveats, keep in mind that I was only looking at very politically active accounts who discuss thier politics in their user bios.  These observations probably don’t apply to all Twitter accounts (and certainly not across different languages).

If you’re interested in reading more, you can check out the fancy-pants versions of this research here and here.  And I definitely intend to consider looking at this; I’ll keep y’all posted on my findings. For now, however, off to find me a Nanimo bar!

Where 👏 do 👏 the 👏 claps 👏 go 👏 when 👏 you 👏 write 👏 like 👏 this 👏?

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 2 Comments

You may already be familiar with the phenomena I’m going to be talking about today: when someone punctuates some text with the clap emoji. It’s a pretty transparent gestural scoring and (for me) immediately brings to mind the way my mom would clap with every word when she was particularly exasperated with my sibling and I (it was usually along with speech like “let’s go, let’s go, let’s go” or “get up now”). It looks like so:

This innovation, which started on Black Twitter is really interesting to me because it ties in with my earlier work on emoji ordering. I want to know where emojis go, particularly in relation to other words. Especially since people have since extended this usage to other emoji, like the US Flag:

https://twitter.com/SarahLerner/status/883732069607587840?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fulysseas%2Fstatus%2F884121094499713024

Logically, there are several different ways you can intersperse clap emojis with text:

  • Claps 👏  are 👏 used 👏 between 👏 every 👏 word.
  •  👏 Claps 👏 are 👏 used 👏 around 👏 every 👏 word. 👏
  •  👏 Claps 👏 are 👏 used 👏 before 👏 every 👏 word.
  • Claps 👏 are 👏 used 👏 after 👏 every 👏 word. 👏
  • Claps 👏 are used 👏 between phrases 👏 not words

I want to know which of these best describes what people actually do. I’m not aiming to write an internet style guide, but I am hoping to characterize this phenomena in a general way: this is how most people who do this do it, and if you want to use this style in a natural way, you should probably do it the same way.

Data

I used Fireant to grab 10,000 tweets from the Twitter streaming API which had the clap emoji in them at least once. (Twitter doesn’t let you search for a certain number of matches of the same string. If you search for “blob” and “blob blob” you’ll get the same set of results.)

Analysis

From that set of 10,000 tweets, I took only the tweets that had a clap emoji followed by a word followed by another clap emoji and threw out any repeats. That left me with 260 tweets. (This may seem pretty small compared to my starting dataset, but there were a lot of retweets in there, and I didn’t want to count anything twice.) Then I removed @usernames, since those show up in the beginning of any tweet that’s a reply to someone, and URL’s, which I don’t really think of as “words”. Finally, I looked at each word in a tweet and marked whether it was a clap or not. You can see the results of that here:

timecourse

The “word” axis represents which word in the tweet we’re looking at: the first, second, third, etc. The red portion of the bar are the words that are the clap emoji. The yellow portion is the words that aren’t. (BTW, big shoutout to Hadley Wickham’s emo(ji) package for letting me include emoji in plots!)

From this we can see a clear pattern: almost no one starts a tweet with an emoji, but most people follow the first word with an emoji. The up-down-up-down pattern means that people are alternating the clap emoji with one word. So if we look back at our hypotheses about how emoji are used, we can see right off the bat that three of them are wrong:

  • Claps 👏  are 👏 used 👏 between 👏 every 👏 word.
  •  👏 Claps 👏 are 👏 used 👏 around 👏 every 👏 word. 👏
  •  👏 Claps 👏 are 👏 used 👏 before 👏 every 👏 word.
  • Claps 👏 are 👏 used 👏 after 👏 every 👏 word. 👏
  • Claps 👏 are used 👏 between phrases 👏 not words

We can pick between the two remaining hypotheses by looking at whether people are ending thier tweets with a clap emoji. As it turns out, the answer is “yes”, more often than not.

endWithClap

If they’re using this clapping-between-words pattern (sometimes called the “ratchet clap“) people are statistically more likely to end their tweet with a clap emoji than with a different word or non-clap emoji. This means the most common pattern is to use 👏 a 👏 clap 👏 after 👏 every 👏 word, 👏  including  👏 the  👏 last. 👏

This makes intuitive sense to me. This pattern is mimicking someone is clapping on every word. Since we can’t put emoji on top of words to indicate that they’re happening at the same time, putting them after makes good intuitive sense. In some sense, each emoji is “attached” to the word that comes before it in a similar way to how “quickly” is “attached” to “run” in the phrase “run quickly”. It makes less sense to put emoji between words, becuase then you end up with less claps than words, which doesn’t line up well with the way this is done in speech.

The “clap after every word” pattern is also what this website that automatically puts claps in your tweets does, so I’m pretty positive this is a good characterization of community norms.

 

So there you have it! If you’re going to put clap emoji in your tweets, you should probably do 👏 it 👏 like 👏 this. 👏 It’s not wrong if you don’t, but it does look kind of weird.

What’s up with calling a woman “a female”? A look at the parts of speech of “male” and “female” on Twitter .

~ Rachael Tatman ~ 5 Comments

This is something I’ve written about before, but I’ve recently had several discussions with people who say they don’t find it odd to refer to a women as a female. Personally, I don’t like being called “a female” becuase its a term I to associate strongly with talking about animals. (Plus, it makes you sound like a Ferengi.)  I would also protest men being called males, for the same reason, but my intuition is that that doesn’t happen as often. I’m willing to admit that my intuition may be wrong in this case, though, so I’ve decided to take a more data-driven approach. I had two main questions:

  • Do “male” and “female” get used as nouns at different rates?
  • Does one of these terms get used more often?

Data collection

I used the Twitter public API to collect two thousand English tweets, one thousand each containing the exact string “a male” and “a female”. I looked for these strings to help get as many tweets as possible with “male” or “female” used as a noun. “A” is what linguist call a determiner, and a determiner has to have a noun after it. It doesn’t have to be the very next word, though; you can get an adjective first, like so:

  • A female mathematician proved the theorm.
  • A female proved the theorm.

So this will let me directly compare these words in a situation where we should only be able to see a limited number of possible parts of speech & see if they differ from each other. Rather than tagging two thousand tweets by hand, I used a Twitter specific part-of-speech tagger to tag each set of tweets.

A part of speech tagger is a tool that guesses the part of speech of every word in a text. So if you tag a sentence like “Apples are tasty”, you should get back that “apples” is a plural noun, “are” is a verb and “tasty” is an adjective. You can try one out for yourself on-line here.

Parts of Speech

In line with my predictions, every instance of “male” or “female” was tagged as either a noun, an adjective or a hashtag. (I went through and looked at the hashtags and they were all porn bots. #gross #hazardsOfTwitterData)

However, not every noun was tagged as the same type of noun. I saw three types of tags in my data: NN (regular old noun), NNS (plural noun) and, unexpectedly, NNP (proper noun, singular). (If you’re confused by the weird upper case abbreviations, they’re the tags used in the Penn Treebank, and you can see the full list here.) In case it’s been a while since you studied parts of speech, proper nouns are things like personal or place names. The stuff that tend to get capitalized in English. The examples from the Penn Treebank documentation include “Motown”, “Venneboerger”,  and “Czestochwa”. I wouldn’t consider either “female” or “male” a name, so it’s super weird that they’re getting tagged as proper nouns. What’s even weirder? It’s pretty much only “male” that’s getting tagged as a proper noun, as you can see below:

maleVsFemalePOS
Number of times each word tagged as each part of speech by the GATE Twitter part-of-speech tagger. NNS is a plural noun, NNP a proper noun, NN a noun and JJ an adjective.

The differences in tagged POS between “male” and “female” was super robust(X2(6, N = 2033) = 1019.2, p <.01.). So what’s happening here?  My first thought was that it might be that, for some reason, “male” is getting capitalized more often and that was confusing the tagger. But when I looked into, there wasn’t a strong difference between the capitalization of “male” and “female”: both were capitalized about 3% of the time. 

My second thought was that it was a weirdness showing up becuase I used a tagger designed for Twitter data. Twitter is notoriously “messy” (in the sense that it can be hard for computers to deal with) so it wouldn’t be surprising if tagging “male” as a proper noun is the result of the tagger being trained on Twitter data. So, to check that, I re-tagged the same data using the Stanford POS tagger. And, sure enough, the weird thing where “male” is overwhelming tagged as a proper noun disappeared.

stanfordTaggerPOS
Number of times each word tagged as each part of speech by the Stanford POS tagger. NNS is a plural noun, NNP a proper noun, NN a noun, JJ an adjective and FW a “foreign word”.

So it looks like “male” being tagged as a proper noun is an artifact of the tagger being trained on Twitter data, and once we use a tagger trained on a different set of texts (in this case the Wall Street Journal) there wasn’t a strong difference in what POS “male” and “female” were tagged as.

Rate of Use

That said, there was a strong difference between “a female” and “a male”: how often they get used. In order to get one thousand tweets with the exact string “a female”, Twitter had to go back an hour and thirty-four minutes. In order to get a thousand tweets with “a male”, however, Twitter had to go back two hours and fifty eight minutes. Based on this sample, “a female” gets said almost twice as often as “a male”.

So what’s the deal?

  • Do “male” and “female” get used as nouns at different rates?  It depends on what tagger you use! In all seriousness, though, I’m not prepared to claim this based on the dataset I’ve collected.
  • Does one of these terms get used more often? Yes! Based on my sample, Twitter users use “a female” about twice as often as “a male”.

I think the greater rate of use of “a female” that points to the possibility of an interesting underlying difference in how “male” and “female” are used, one that calls for a closer qualitative analysis. Does one term get used to describe animals more often than the other? What sort of topics are people talking about when they say “a male” and “a female”? These questions, however, will have to wait for the next blog post!

In the meantime, I’m interested in getting more opinions on this. How do you feel about using “a male” and “a female” as nouns to talk about humans? Do they sound OK or strike you as odd?

My code and is available on my GitHub.