How is Natural Language Processing (NLP) used to moderate content?

We live in an increasingly digitized world. With the rise of social media, the internet has become the ‘go to’ place for people to express their thoughts and opinions. 

Sadly, it comes as no surprise that some of the content found online is harmful or toxic. That’s where content moderation and natural language processing comes in. 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the many branches of A.I. It is an effective tool which helps create safer and more respectful online communities by giving computers the ability to understand human language.

What is NLP used for?

NLP, as it relates to moderation, is a powerful tool which helps categorise and understand comments through contextual analysis. 

A focus on contextual understanding is all the more important because it helps make a clear distinction between a simple opinion, hateful and toxic comments or even just a joke. 

The role of Natural Language Processing at Bodyguard is not to censor people from expressing themselves online but rather to promote a comment section that is free of harmful content and where meaningful exchanges can take place.

NLP techniques

Because context is so important, Bodyguard's NLP technology has an entire team dedicated to it. The NLP team’s mission is to ensure that Bodyguard’s technology provides a near-human level of accuracy. While A.I. is getting better at understanding human emotion, there is still a need for syntactic and semantic understanding. As natural language continues to evolve, the NLP team tasks itself to stay on top of current, past, and future trends through research and keeping the Bodyguard technology up-to-date. 

How Bodyguard uses NLP

NLP technology is all the more important for Bodyguard because of the wide array of clients that rely on our solution and technology to protect their communities. 

Bodyguard starts off by retrieving the comments and cleaning them up. This means that comments containing elements such as emojis or punctuation marks used to replace letters, for example, are transformed into computer understandable words. Thanks to in-house NLP specialists, such attempts to avoid moderation are quickly spotted and added to the Bodyguard.ai technology to make sure that the detection is always up-to-speed with what is being said.

After the comment has been cleaned up, each part is analyzed and the harmful or toxic elements are identified. The real magic happens when the NLP technology's understanding of context and taxonomy is used to determine whether a comment is harmful or not. 

Coupled with our customisable moderation rules to match each client’s needs, a decision is made on whether a comment should be removed or kept.

What are the advantages of using Natural Language Processing?

The use of Bodyguard’s NLP for moderation comes with many advantages. The first is its ability to understand and analyse human language. With the rapid evolution of language natural to the internet, Bodyguard’s NLP has the ability to be quickly updated, to help you better understand your communities and mirror the natural language landscape of the internet today.

Monitoring: Monitoring not only helps the NLP team keep the Bodyguard technology aligned with the ever-changing language used on the internet, it helps identify new linguistic trends.

Understanding how and why different words and expressions are used within various online communities aids in the comprehension of their interactions. This linguistic monitoring is one of the ways Bodguard.ai is able to protect internet users in a way that best mirrors their communities.

Customisable: Bodyguard moderation solution can easily be customized to adapt to any specific sector needs. Through monitoring, Bodguard.ai’s technology is being enriched with jargon and internet specific lingo. Depending on the unique needs of a platform, the moderation rules might need to be customized to adapt to the communities being protected.

Automated: Bodyguard’s NLP technology is always kept up-to-date, making it an accurate and relevant tool for moderation. The automatic removal of toxic content means that social media managers no longer have to allocate time to moderation, and can focus on what they are most passionate about.  

Savings: Bodyguard’s automatic moderation solution looks after your platforms, keeping them toxic-free in real time. Where human moderators are needed, Bodyguard’s technology reduces the workload and the number required. The NLP technology can thus be used to help moderators to make better, faster and more informed decisions. 

Conclusion

Together with Bodyguard’s cutting-edge technology, in-house linguistic expertise, machine learning, and smart computer programs, NLP is a powerful and effective tool for keeping online content and social media sites safe, welcoming and engaging. Bodyguard’s use of NLP shows how it can effectively help stop harmful content from spreading online. Essentially, Bodyguard’s technology lets you focus on growing your platforms, creating engagement and improving the online experience for your audience, instead of always dealing with problems. With NLP leading the way, brands and businesses of every kind can make it easier for people to connect and express themselves in their online communities, without worry.

Starting your content moderation journey?

Bodyguard is designed to help you create a healthier online community, no matter what your business or brand. From content moderation itself through to community analytics and crisis anticipation, we take care of all your moderation needs. If you're ready to find out more, contact us for more information.