Language analysis tool to ascertain age and gender

Now, computer scientists at Lancaster University have been working on a tool that can work out a person’s age and gender using language analysis techniques. They hope it will eventually be used to help police and law enforcement agencies spot when an adult in a chat room is masquerading as a child as part of the victim ’grooming’ process.

For several months, groups of children and teenagers from the Queen Elizabeth School in Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria, have been taking part in experiments designed to provide the researchers with exactly the kind of informal web chat they need to help improve the accuracy of their software.

But the 350 students have also unwittingly been taking part in an experiment to find out if they know when they are talking to adults posing as children online.

So far, the results show that even pupils as old as 17 struggled to tell the difference between a child and an adult and approximately four out of five thought they were chatting to a teenager when, in fact, it was an adult. Girls were better at telling the difference than boys – 22 per cent of the girls guessed correctly, while only 16 per cent of the boys did.