Gender prediction has typically focused on lexical and social network features, yielding good performance, but making systems highly language-, topic-, and platform-dependent. Cross-lingual embeddings circumvent some of these limitations, but capture gender-specific style less. We propose an alternative: bleaching text, i.e., transforming lexical strings into more abstract features. This study provides evidence that such features allow for better transfer across languages. Moreover, we present a first study on the ability of humans to perform cross-lingual gender prediction. We find that human predictive power proves similar to that of our bleached models, and both perform better than lexical models.
 Much of the writing styles recognized in rhetorical and composition theories involve deep syntactic elements. However, most previous research for computational stylometric analysis has relied on shallow lexico-syntactic patterns. Some very recent work has shown that PCFG models can detect distributional difference in syntactic styles, but without offering much insights into exactly what constitute salient stylistic elements in sentence structure characterizing each authorship. In this paper, we present a comprehensive exploration of syntactic elements in writing styles, with particular emphasis on interpretable characterization of stylistic elements. We present analytic insights with respect to the authorship attribution task in two different domains. Psychology research suggests that certain personality traits correlate with linguistic behavior. This correlation can be effectively modeled with statistical natural language processing techniques. Prediction accuracy generally improves with larger data samples, which also allows for more lexical features. Most existing work on personality prediction, however, focuses on small samples and closed-vocabulary investigations. Both factors limit the generality and statistical power of the results. In this paper, we explore the use of social media as a resource for large-scale, openvocabulary personality detection. We analyze which features are predictive of which personality traits, and present a novel corpus of 1.2M English tweets annotated with Myers-Briggs personality type and gender. Our experiments show that social media data can provide sufficient linguistic evidence to reliably predict two of four personality dimensions.    The problem of automatically determining the gender of a document's author would appear to be a more subtle problem than those of categorization by topic or authorship attribution. Nevertheless, it is shown that automated text categorization techniques can exploit combinations of simple lexical and syntactic features to infer the gender of the author of an unseen formal written document with approximately 80 per cent accuracy. The same techniques can be used to determine if a document is fiction or non-fiction with approximately 98 per cent accuracy. Social networks are often grounded in spatial locality where individuals form relationships with those they meet nearby. However, the location of individuals in online social networking platforms is often unknown. Prior approaches have tried to infer individuals' locations from the content they produce online or their online relations, but often are limited by the available location-related data. We propose a new method for social networks that accurately infers locations for nearly all of individuals by spatially propagating location assignments through the social network, using only a small number of initial locations. In five experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness in multiple social networking platforms, using both precise and noisy data to start the inference, and present heuristics for improving performance. In one experiment, we demonstrate the ability to infer the locations of a group of users who generate over 74 of the daily Twitter message volume with an estimated median location error of 10km. Our results open the possibility of gathering large quantities of location-annotated data from social media platforms. User profiling on social media data is normally done within a supervised setting. A typical feature of supervised models that are trained on data from a specific genre, is their limited portability to other genres. Cross-genre models were developed in the context of PAN 2016, where systems were trained on tweets, and tested on other non-tweet social media data. Did the model that achieved best results at this task got lucky or was it truly designed in a cross-genre manner, with features general enough to capture demographics beyond Twitter? We explore this question via a series of in-genre and cross-genre experiments on English and Spanish using the best performing system at PAN 2016, and discover that portability is successful to a certain extent, provided that the sub-genres involved are close enough. In such cases, it is also more beneficial to do cross-genre than in-genre modelling if the cross-genre setting can benefit from larger amounts of training data than those available in-genre.