TAT: an author profiling tool with application to Arabic emails

Tanja Gaustad, Dominique Estival, Ben Hutchinson

Abstract: This paper reports on the application of the Text Attribution Tool (TAT) to profiling the authors of Arabic emails. The TAT system has been developed for the purpose of language-independent author profiling and has now been trained on two email corpora, English and Arabic. We describe the overall TAT system and the Machine Learning experiments resulting in classifiers for the different author traits. Predictions for demographic and psychometric author traits show improvements over the baseline for some of the author traits with both the English and the Arabic data. Arabic presents particular challenges for NLP and this paper describes more specifically the text processing components developed to handle Arabic emails.