The challenge: Costly manual moderation with varying quality

• Labour-intensive and monotonous manual work
• Hard to maintain consistency and achieve good quality
• Difficulty in finding an effective moderation solution for Southeast Asian languages

The solution: AI-based, real time pre-moderation deployed

• All Southeast Asian languages and dialects supported
• Increased quality and consistency drove improved customer experience
• 2-week deployment, 95-98% reduction in manual work

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‍“As a content and community platform for parents in Southeast Asia, theAsianparent needs to cater to a wide variety of languages that are not typically supported by moderation platforms. Utopia’s real-time language-agnostic solution provides the perfect fit. We have been able to weed out unacceptable content more effectively, and massively reduce the need for human moderation. This not only improves customer experience and reduces direct costs, but also frees up managerial oversight, which can then be reassigned.”

Michael Hart
SVP Data Science and Machine Learning
theAsianparent
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1. Challenges

theAsianparent’s Indonesian community alone produces 10,000 messages per day. Manual moderation of these messages is highly monotonous, resulting in challenges when trying to maintain a high quality, consistent, and motivated moderation team.

Replacing manual moderation with a machine learning approach was still not a given. theAsianparent learned that most Southeast Asian languages were poorly supported within the machine learning community, and that some languages could be formal or non-formal, and even further simplified for social media communication.

2. Solution

Given the wide variety of languages that theAsianparent supports, it became clear that a language-agnostic solution was required. The company discovered Utopia AI Moderator, which had the ability to provide text analytics in any language.

3. Implementation

The first stage of implementation was for theAsianparent to provide pre-labeled messages to help train a tailor-made Utopia AI Moderator model. Care was taken to reduce the initial volume of training data required by allowing the model to learn more during live operation. According to theAsianparent, Utopia had very clear requirements on which messages required human moderation to help efficiently improve the model.

Utopia AI Moderator went live towards the end of 2021. Now that all questions and answers are pre-moderated in real time, the volume of messages that require human moderation has dropped by 95-98%. theAsianparent was able to further improve Utopia AI Moderator’s performance with messages specifically related to bullying, without any interruption to the service, by providing a one-off batch of bullying related training data.

4. Results

“Working with Utopia has been a pleasure. At every level they have been professional, communicative, and willing to adapt to our needs. The moderation of our community messages has been a success, and we now have a maintainable, consistent, adaptive, and instantaneous moderation system, which helps theAsianparent provide a better and safer community for our Southeast Asian parents,” says Michael Hart, SVP Data Science and Machine Learning at theAsianparent.

About theAsianparent

theAsianparent is Southeast Asia’s largest content and community platform for parents, with a reach of over 35 million users monthly and an app store rating of 4.9 stars (Download the app here). Available in 11 languages across 13 countries, theAsianparent aims to help parents have healthy pregnancies and raise healthy, happy, and confident children by providing relevant content, a safe community, and numerous trackers that empower and enable them throughout their pre-conception, pregnancy, and parenting journey.

Headquartered in Singapore, theAsianparent investors include: Central Retail Corporation, East Ventures, Fosun International, Global Grand Leisure, JD.com, LINE SEA Corp., Mirae Asset-Naver New Growth Fund, Redbadge Pacific, SCB 10X, Tigris Capital, Vertex Ventures, and WHG Holdings.