Gender Detection and Stylistic Differences and Similarities between Males and Females in a Dream Tales Blog
Authors: Raffaele Manna, Antonio Pascucci, Johanna Monti (Università di Napoli L'Orientale, 2019)
Topic: Textual Genres & Literature Linguistics

Abstract
In this paper we present the results of a gender detection experiment carried out on a corpus we built downloading dream tales from a blog. We also highlight stylistic differences and similarities concerning lexical choices between men and women. In order to carry the experiment we built a feed-forward neural network with traditional sparse n-hot encoding using the Keras open source library.

Introduction
It is generally accepted that dreams are just an unconscious production, and that represent a type of non-manipulable happening. However, many people believe that dreams are premonitory of future events as well as representations and reworkings of past events. Humans tend to preserve all personal events, some of them in the form of a diary, namely the best method to tell an event and keep its aura of magic. Until recently, dream reports were relegated to the the pages of paper journals or revealed to familiar people. At an earlier time, dreams are gathered from sleep research labs, psycho-therapeutic and in patient settings, personal dream journals and occasionally classroom settings where “most recent dreams” and “most vivid dreams” are collected as in AUTHOR. Social media have opened millions of pages where people feel at ease to confess their thoughts, their experience and even their secret fantasies. These platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and web blogs are a good ground for computational text analysis research in social science and mental health assessment via language. The recent development of web communities focused on telling dreams allows researchers to access and discover new characteristics related to the language of dreams. Stylistic and linguistic features of dreams in blog reports are essential in order to detect writing style and content differences between men and women, but also enable future researches associated to the different types of personality and styles associated with mental health diagnoses and therapeutic outcomes. The aim of this paper is to show that despite dreams are just an unconscious production, there are several stylistic differences between the reports of dreams by males and females on online blogs. The model we built is able to represent and classify all stylistic differences. Moreover, this research represents a preliminary step in the field of dream tales which will be followed by an attempt to find stylistic differences between dream tales and other forms of self narration (i.e. travel tales). The paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 we introduce Related Work, in Section 3 we describe the corpus we built and the blog. Methodology is described in Section 4 and Results are in Section 5. In Section 6 we present our Conclusions and we introduce Future Work.

Conclusion
In this paper we have shown our results on gender detection in dream diaries and writing styles differences and similarities between males and females in dream tales. First we explored the vocabulary of dream descriptions for both the genreclass by listing some of the representative words for each genre. Then, we evaluated our gender detection model on the dream reports dataset. The model succeeded in obtaining good results managing to distinguish a good part of dreams made by men or women. This research represents our preliminary step in the field, toward subsequent studies, in which we are trying to detect stylistic differences between dream tales and personal descriptive narratives, such as travel tales and other forms of self-narration.