Comprehend

Homepage

https://aws.amazon.com/comprehend/

What is it?

A natural language processor, which uses AI to analyse text.

Why did we choose it?

It has clear data privacy rules, as the AWS AI services all have legally binding opt-outs. It also has a fairly low cost, and can be used easily for small pieces of text.

What do we use it for?

Screening user comments on artworks, to check for e.g. hate speech or abusive content. Comprehend returns a bunch of scores indicating its confidence of text having e.g. hate speech or threatening content, and we use this to reject or review comments that are flagged above a threshold we set.

This helps to reduce the burden on human moderators, not only in terms of workload but also in terms of not having to see the most abusive comments.