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28.05.03 WINNOW, a software for recognizing the sex of a writer.
Among the many branches of artificial intelligence, 'stylometry', one of the less known, investigates the problem of recognizing the sex of a writer by examining his/her style. Shlomo Argamon is a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and developed WINNOW, a program which does it. In the author's opinion, women write in a more 'interactive' style, while men are more inclined to use numbers and adjectives, eager to provide specific informations correctly. This software correctly identified 80% of the works it examined, failing on some of them, such as 'Possession', by the female author A.S. Byatt and 'A Landing on the Sun', a science fiction short novel by Michael Frayn. WINNOW was optimized after the analysis of 566 books and articles, both novels ands essays, taken from the large British National Corpus database.