Content moderation is a key step to providing safe and positive online communities. It saves time and money for businesses of all sizes while preventing legal or reputational damages caused by harmful content.
There are multiple tools Trust & Safety teams can use for Content Moderation, but they broadly fall into three categories: word filters and RegEx solutions, classifiers, and contextual AI. Spectrum Labs Guardian uses all three methods.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
The more data a model is fed the faster and better it learns. This is particularly true for content moderation AI. The goal is to have a high level of operational precision: that is, detecting and removing harmful behavior without falsely flagging benign behavior.
NLP uses machine learning to understand and analyze human language. This enables computers to recognize patterns in speech, text, and documents. NLP is well suited for content moderation because it can identify and remove hate speech, spam, terrorist propaganda, or other inappropriate content at scale. It can also understand context, such as sarcasm or cultural nuances.
NLP technology can be used in pre-moderation (AI identifies harmful content before it is posted) and post-moderation (AI detects and reports potential harm to human moderators). Lettria’s intuitive platform offers a variety of AI-Assisted tools and automation that speed up detection processes, while improving the accuracy of your model-generated content categorizations through active learning cycles.
Text Analysis
ML tools to identify speech patterns that violate community standards or are otherwise harmful need a lot of labeled data, which must be carefully sourced and curated. Whether built in house or purchased from an Machine Learning content moderation software provider like Spectrum Labs, these tools are designed to augment human content moderators and must be capable of identifying specific behaviors.
This is particularly important in the case of review sites, retail and social media where customer feedback is often open-ended or unsolicited. This data may come from reviews, social media comments, web forums or independent surveys, but must be analyzed in order to extract actionable insights for the company.
A robust ML solution for text analysis will be able to recognize dozens of languages and their social contexts, allowing it to detect harmful forms of content such as spam, fake news or cyberbullying. The best ML tools will also give you the option to use pre-configured models for your project, which can greatly improve efficiency.
Classification
Detecting harmful content on SM platforms requires more than just keywords, image recognition, and object detection. To be effective, the software needs to understand the context of the words, and the feelings they evoke.
The good news is that there’s already a lot of research on how to improve this. Some of it focuses on training models to recognize harmful forms of content such as fake news, hate speech, or cyberbullying.
Others use a process called text classification to analyze the intent behind the words. It can identify the tone of a post or comment (positive, negative, neutral) and categorize it accordingly.
Still other algorithms can scan images or video for emojis, logos, or other types of visual information. These can then be compared to a database of known images or videos. This kind of ML technology helps to identify content that may need additional human review. It also helps to reduce the moderator’s fatigue by reducing the number of items they need to check.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Analysis uses Natural Language Processing algorithms to identify the intended tone of text. This can be a challenge because it is difficult to translate subjective human feelings into objective, quantifiable scores that take context and nuance into account. For example, a word that is harmless in one context could be viewed as offensive or harmful in another.
Businesses can use sentiment analysis to monitor customer sentiment in communities, forums and social media, and track competitor mentions to build up a picture of brand reputation over time. They can also use fine-grained sentiment analysis to understand the underlying meaning of individual sentences in text such as reviews, tweets and survey responses.
The ability to detect toxic and harmful content is a critical component of machine learning moderation AI. Spectrum Labs has built a world-leading data vault capturing harmful and positive behaviors, which is used as the training set for our AI models. This ensures that our models are always delivering accurate results.