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Language Analysis Tool to Ascertain Age and Gender

The Engineer (United Kingdom) (06/22/10)



Lancaster University computer scientists are developing software that uses language analysis techniques to determine the age and gender of people in chat rooms. The tool could help law enforcement agencies protect children from online pedophiles. In order to improve the accuracy of the software, the Lancaster team has been conducting tests on the informal Web chats of groups of children and teenagers. The project included an experiment to determine whether the 350 participants knew when they were talking to adults who were posing as students. The experiment found that about 80 percent could not tell the difference, but the software correctly identified whether a child or adult was writing the Web chat in 47 out of 50 cases. "We hope to develop an automated system that can pick up on quirks of language particular to a certain age group," says Lancaster professor Awais Rashid. "These language patterns can help us to expose adults that seek to groom children online by posing as children in chat rooms, for example." The software also could enable law enforcement to trail pedophiles as they move around the Internet.

(from ACM TechNews)