Twitter User loves his (or her) Mother...

I came across this article on CNN.com today.

Gender Neutral Pronoun

The article discusses why the English language doesn't have a gender neutral pronoun. Apparently users of Twitter are concerned. I assume this is because it takes up valuable letters to write 'he or she' in a twitter...oh the humanity of it.

The article uses the following example:

Consider the sentence "Everyone loves his mother." The word "his" may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with "his or her" seems cumbersome, and "their" is grammatically incorrect.

The idea that English on the net is different from English in true spoken or written form is something I have talked about before. There probably is no reason why a gender neutral pronoun can't be introduced in netspeak and adopted a whole lot quicker than in regular English. For example we all understand the term 'lol' but few up us would actually use it when we are talking in real life to someone. In fact if you did use it people would probably just start to avoid you.

As we are building our Virsona Dialog Engine technology we have to be able to handle both 'proper' English and netspeak English. They are significantly different forms of communication. In fact we have learnt (learned) some pretty interesting things in terms of how the engine needs to adapt to online communication vs regular english communication. We use the term Natural Language Processing but perhaps what we are really starting to develop is Netural Language Processing.

So if the twitterati wants to come up with a suitable replacement for he / she - we will be ready for it.