Predicting Twitter User Demographics from Names Alone
Zach Wood-Doughty, Nicholas Andrews, Rebecca Marvin, Mark H. Dredze · 2018
Social media analysis frequently requires tools that can automatically infer demographics to contextualize trends.These tools often require hundreds of user-authored messages for each user, which may be prohibitive to obtain when analyzing millions of users.We explore character-level neural models that learn a representation of a user's name and screen name to predict gender and ethnicity, allowing for demographic inference with minimal data.We release trained models 1 which may enable new demographic analyses that would otherwise require enormous amounts of data collection.