tigerfort: the Stripey Captain, with a bat friend perched on her head keeping her ears warm (Default)
tigerfort ([personal profile] tigerfort) wrote2016-05-15 11:18 am
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Just another dent in the desk.

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.

[identity profile] osymandias.livejournal.com 2016-05-16 01:44 pm (UTC)(link)
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.