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Expert.ai Recognizes Natural Language Apps That Encourage Positive Change

17 November 2022

Winners announced for the global virtual hackathon “Turn Language into Action”

Expert.ai announced today the winners of “Turn Language into Action: A Natural Language Hackathon for Good”, which ran on the Devpost platform from September 8 to October 27, 2022. A qualified panel of judges selected six winners from a pool of more than 500 global participants.

Developers were challenged with creating an app that created positive change by embedding natural language processing, word meaning disambiguation and sentiment analysis leveraging expert.ai’s ‘smart from the start’ Knowledge Models in three domains:

  1. Hate speech detection
  2. ESG (environmental, social, governance)
  3. Emotional traits & sentiment analysis

Turn Language into Action: a NL Hackathon for Good” Winners

  • First place ($5,000): PagePal – Help children with ASD better understand emotions in text. PagePal   helps children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to better recognize emotions in books or other forms of storytelling. PagePal uses the expert.ai NL API to highlight and label emotional traits in text on the screen so that readers can follow the emotional elements throughout a story.
  • Second place ($2,500): atlatAnalyze/Understand Human Rights Complaints. Atlat’s Complaint Analyzer provides workers with an anonymous channel to submit human rights violations or other workplace concerns directly to the corporate social responsibility (CSR) team of the brands for which they work. Atlat uses the expert.ai API to analyze and classify complaints according to ESG risk areas, to understand the sentiment of the complaint and to identify any personally identifiable information (PII) so that the anonymity of the worker is preserved.
  • Third place ($1,000): MeMo – Metaverse moderator. MeMo (Metaverse Moderator) uses AI to create a safer metaverse. MeMo uses the expert.ai NL API to analyze contributed comments before it goes live to identify hate speech, the use of PII and overall sentiment as well as provide end users with information about the sentiment, emotional traits or content warnings in a metaverse story to protect them from inappropriate content.
  • 1st honorable mention ($500) for “Hate Speech” category: citizen5 – Decentralized open-source investigations into war crimes.  Citizen5 is a secure tool for open-source digital investigations into war crimes designed to overcome disinformation and attempts to discredit investigations by promoting transparency in the investigative process. Citizen5 uses the expert.ai API to analyze articles, transcripts, interviews and other media to identify hate speech, detect and anonymize PII and to extract relations from text.
  • 2nd honorable mention ($500) for “ESG” category: SustainaMeter – Raise transparency on companies’ ESG actions. The SustainaMeter app provides insights to companies and the public to increase transparency about companies’ attitudes towards ESG and to facilitate comparison within their industry and with public perception. It uses expert.ai to classify companies’ LinkedIn posts into ESG categories and to assign sentiment scores for each post.
  • 3nd honorable mention ($500) for “sentiment & emotions” category: News Report A report card for your news reports. News Report helps readers know if a website or article is untrustworthy or generating negative emotions, such as fear and outrage. NewsReport uses expert.ai to find instances of hate speech and negative emotions to determine the density of these elements and calculate an easily interpretable “grade” for each website.

“We are impressed by the high caliber of submissions that showcase the variety of use cases where our AI-based NL capabilities can be a game changer for building innovative applications that leverage language data,” said Keith C. Lincoln, chief marketing officer at expert.ai. “We want to congratulate the winning teams for truly turning language into action and stimulating new ways of thinking to solve enterprise data problems as well as making a positive impact on our society.”

On November 17 at 11:00 am ET / 5:00 pm CET, expert.ai will present the winners and highlight their submissions during the company’s next “NLP Stream” episode Turn Language into Action: Hackathon Winners Announcement!