Technology can also boost the #MeeToo movement . Proof of this is the project developed by the University of Maastricht (Netherlands), which aims to help victims of sexual assault, whether physical or verbal. It is a chatbot based on artificial intelligence and machine learning that can simulate a conversation with a person and thus help those who do not feel comfortable telling their experience out loud.
The chatbot analyses the victim's responses and identifies, for example, the type of violence, the location and the time at which the incident may have taken place. This information is processed anonymously with the help of algorithms and helps to decide which institution to turn to for help: the police station, a hospital or a psychologist, for example. albania phone number It is scheduled to be launched in 2020 and has the support of the Dutch city council and the police, as well as the approval of the national Centre on Sexual Violence.
To develop the project, which was presented this Friday at the European Machine Learning Conference, held in Würzburg (Germany), university students took as an example some 12,000 reports written in different years by real victims of these attacks to be able to divide them into 5 categories: verbal abuse, non-verbal abuse (with gestures or attitudes), physical abuse and serious physical abuse and other forms of harassment.
“The idea is to make people feel safe and not embarrassed, so the data collected and processed are anonymous. We took empathy into account, of course, because it is a machine and not a human interlocutor, so we are still adjusting the questions to the stories , so that they can receive an appropriate answer. We have started in English and will later do so in Dutch, but other languages are not ruled out,” explains Jerry Spanakis, assistant professor at the Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering in Maastricht and lead researcher on the project.
“Another reason for this chatbot is that many victims do not report abuse because they think that they will not be listened to and that the perpetrator will go unpunished. That is why the police and the municipality of Maastricht are supporting us, which is where we want to act for now. If the user consents, their data is stored anonymously and can help the officers to identify the location of abuse on the city map and its frequency. However, we hope to further refine the type of questions asked with the help of the victims, to be sure that we are on the right track. It is a serious and sensitive issue,” says Spanakis.
Although the Dutch city will be the chatbot's first field of operations, the expert hopes that in the future "access will be free through an open and non-commercial web ."