Q. Can a computer tell from published documents whether the author is a man or a woman?

A. One computer program had a reported accuracy rate of 80 percent in its analysis of language patterns in modern written material.

In a study published in 2002 in the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing, researchers analyzed 566 published documents in British English using a program they called Winnow.

The program was “trained” on material that was labeled having been written by men or women. It then analyzed the comparative frequency in unlabeled documents of scores of features of writing judged to be independent of content.

The features included parts of speech, like nouns and pronouns, and function words, like “and” and “the,” which have little meaning of their own but indicate grammatical relationships within a sentence. It also studied patterns like two-and three-word phrases — for example, “above the table.”