IIIT-Hyderabad’s Project Angel to Fight Cyber Toxicity

A group of researchers from the International Institute of Technology-Hyderabad (IIIT-H) are building a natural language processing (NLP) tool to help adolescent girls combat online social biases or toxicity in the form of body-shaming, sexual harassment.

Project Angel

• The IIIT-Hyderabad began Project Angel after the group, through interviews and surveys, found incidences of depression among 25-30% of girls in that age group.
• This NLP tool not only detects online sexist comments but also automatically labelled and categorized them.
• It is a tailor-made technology for teenage girls as that is a more vulnerable age.
• The NLP tool is non- intrusive and does not compromise on the privacy of the users.
• The NLP tool entails applies algorithms to identify and extract the natural language rules and it involves semantics which refers to the meaning that is conveyed by a text.
• Project Angel similar to an individual can read what is on your wall, and if it detects some hate-speech, it will alert you about it.

The initiative is significant not just from a technological point of view, but also from a social sciences perspective. It assists social scientists and policymakers to study and counter sexism better.

The researchers are also working on finding the right point of interventions necessary, to bring in the required positivity into any of the platforms used by teens through the project.