ArabGend: Gender Analysis and Inference on Arabic Twitter

TL;DR

This paper conducts an extensive analysis of gender differences on Arabic Twitter and introduces a novel method for gender inference achieving high accuracy, addressing a gap in Arabic social media research.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale gender analysis of Arabic Twitter users and proposes a new multi-modal gender inference method with improved accuracy.

Findings

Gender differences in engagement and interests identified

Proposed method achieves 82.1% F1 score in gender inference

Annotated dataset of 166K Arabic Twitter accounts created

Abstract

Gender analysis of Twitter can reveal important socio-cultural differences between male and female users. There has been a significant effort to analyze and automatically infer gender in the past for most widely spoken languages' content, however, to our knowledge very limited work has been done for Arabic. In this paper, we perform an extensive analysis of differences between male and female users on the Arabic Twitter-sphere. We study differences in user engagement, topics of interest, and the gender gap in professions. Along with gender analysis, we also propose a method to infer gender by utilizing usernames, profile pictures, tweets, and networks of friends. In order to do so, we manually annotated gender and locations for ~166K Twitter accounts associated with ~92K user location, which we plan to make publicly available at http://anonymous.com. Our proposed gender inference method achieve an F1 score of 82.1%, which is 47.3% higher than majority baseline. In addition, we also developed a demo and made it publicly available.