Just another dent in the desk.

[tigerfort]

I've just updated my essay on asking about gender and titles with a note that you should never assume you can "work out" someone's gender from other information about them. I'd rather assumed this was obvious, but apparently it isn't. Oh, people.

Comments

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

To be fair, this is in a project that's doing natural language processing, so it's trying to infer *everything* from just what's written down. You'll also see similar modules for working out whether a word refers to a person at all, or to a place, or to a date. Yes, the rules are somewhat simplistic, but I suspect they are a decent approximation to how a (Western, English speaking) person might attempt to infer such information, which is after all the point of such a project.