Ink Dries On The Battle Of The Sexes

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 12, 2003

Andrew Stevenson

Plagiarists, hoaxers and anonymous authors beware: you can write but you can't hide.

Not even gender can be masked, according to Moshe Koppel, an Israeli academic who helped design software that identifies literary signatures, including those dividing men and women.

Analysing contemporary works including songs, novels and non-fiction, Mr Koppel, of Bar-Ilan University , found statistical regularities splitting male and female writers.

Women love pronouns, especially `I' and `you', and use words indicating relationships between writer and reader more often, whereas men describe, specify and quantify.

``If you check prepositions you find men and women use exactly the same number overall. But women use `for' and `with' 40 per cent more often than men," Mr Koppel said. ``It's just bizarre. But in addition we found women use more negation they say `not' and `nor' and `never' much more than men."

Mr Koppel, conscious that his initial paper on the subject was rejected, stops at a chuckle when quizzed on why.

But John Burrows, emeritus professor of English, University of Newcastle, who has also researched the field, is braver.

He suggested the different use of prepositions may be because women are more preoccupied with what's standing before them, while men have a more detached, abstract and general view.

Women's negativity could work against men trying to dominate conversation. ``In olden times, men always had the upper hand and women were playing a defensive game in argument. Men confidently assumed their positions and women tended to have to fight for them," Professor Burrows said. ``To what extent it still applies is an open question."

Although the software's accuracy is only about 83 per cent, Mr Koppel backed it against hoaxers such as Leon Carmen, the white, Sydney taxi driver who won a literary prize in 1996 pretending to be an Aboriginal woman, Wanda Koolmatrie .

``The guy was obviously trying to conceal his style but my guess is that he wouldn't have been able to fool the program. There's so many subtle hints," Mr Koppel said.

Professor Burrows puts plagiarists and anonymous authors on notice the forensic power of computer analysis is very hard to defeat.

``My experience is that the way you can penetrate imitations is to examine a large number of variables because the more balls there are in a game the more difficult it is to juggle them," he said.