Simply the Best: Minimalist System Trumps Complex Models in Author Profiling

摘要

A simple linear SVM with word and character n-gram features and minimal parameter tuning can identify the gender and the language variety (for English, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese) of Twitter users with very high accuracy. All our attempts at improving performance by including more data, smarter features, and employing more complex architectures plainly fail. In addition, we experiment with joint and multitask modelling, but find that they are clearly outperformed by single task models. Eventually, our simplest model was submitted to the PAN 2017 shared task on author profiling, obtaining an average accuracy of 0.86 on the test set, with performance on sub-tasks ranging from 0.68 to 0.98. These were the best results achieved at the competition overall. To allow lay people to easily use and see the value of machine learning for author profiling, we also built a web application on top our models.