Does anyone know of a good library for mapping a person's name to his or her gender? [closed]

Answer 1

It's not free, but this is a nice library that I have used before:

NetGender for .NET allows you to quickly and easily build Name Verification, Parsing and Gender Determination into your custom applications. Accurately verify whether a particular field contains a valid individual or company. NetGender uses a 100,000+, ethnically diverse, Name Dictionary in combination with an 8,000+ Company Name Dictionary to ensure precise gender determination.

http://www.softwarecompany.com/dotnet/netgender.htm

Answer 2

You can have a look at my python gender detection project https://github.com/muatik/genderizer

It tries to detect authors' genders looking their names and/or sample text(for example tweets) of them.

And it also supports mongodb, memcached for performance.

Answer 3

I haven't used it, but IBM has a Global Name Analytics library (for a price!) that seems pretty comprehensive.

Answer 4

The python package SexMachine will do that for you. Given any first name it returns if it's male, female or unisex. It relies on the data from the gender.c program by Jorg Michael.

Answer 5

Although databases are probably the most practical solution, if you want to have some fun maybe you could try writing a neural net (or using a neural net library) that takes in the name and outputs one of those 3 options (F,M,A).

You could train it using the datasets that exist in the databases suggested by other answers, as well as with any other data you have.

This solution would allow you to handle names not specifically categorised previously, and also handle different languages. You might want to pass the language (if you know it) as an input to the neural net as well.

I don't know that I can say neural nets (or any other machine learning) would do a good job of categorising though.

Answer 6

IMHO, it is a generally bad idea to determine sex from an individuals name. A lot of names are intersexual (good grief, is this even a word ?? :-), and also they may be one sex in one culture and another in another.

A few stupid examples, just a few that came to mind (from my part of the world, CE)

Vanja - female, in eastern countries from here, mostly male
Alex - intersex (short for Sandra, female, and Sandro, male)
Robin - in western cultures, can be both

In some parts of the world, a persons sex can be determined by looking at how the name ends. For example, Marija, Sandra, Ivana, Petra, Sara, Lucija, Ana - you can see that most of these female names end in "ja" or "ra". There are other examples as well.

Still, I think it's better just to ask the user for sex.