MEN and women have different writing styles, and a computer program can tell them apart.
Computer scientists at Bar-Ilan University in Israel created a program to identify the gender of an author. After being trained on 566 pieces of fiction and non-fiction it found that men and women use certain different key words more often. Women are more likely to use the words 鈥渘ot鈥�, 鈥渨ouldn鈥檛,鈥� 鈥渃ouldn鈥檛,鈥� and 鈥渟houldn鈥檛鈥� and the prepositions 鈥渇or鈥� and 鈥渨ith鈥�. Men use 鈥渢he鈥� and 鈥渁nd鈥� more frequently. Given a new text the program can correctly identify the author鈥檚 gender four times out of five. The research will be published in upcoming issues of two journals, Literary and Linguistic Computing and Text.