Unlocking human rights information with machine learning

December 8, 2021
Dm4r

Human rights defenders need information from many sources to do their work effectively. But as issues evolve and new precedents are set, finding the right information to defend a particular case can be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

For example, a human rights advocate campaigning for LGBTQ rights may want to know which countries have made the most progress and what resolutions they’ve passed. To do so, they have to manually sift through thousands of pages of dense documentation covering global laws and victims’ testimonies to find what they’re looking for.

The curation and cataloging of documents makes this process much easier, but still relies on the manual work of skilled experts. To help, the non-profit organization

The curation process of human rights documents gets a boost

Since then, HURIDOCS has launched ML-powered features to improve platforms they’ve built with other NGO partners, and, earlier this year, they began integrating the technology into more of its tools, including their flagship application Uwazi. As a result, updating documents now takes one week instead of two to three months, and curators have been able to catch up on multi-year document backlogs.

In June, HURIDOCS won a CogX Award for its machine learning work, and now the organization is continuing to explore what else its machine learning models can do — from creating automatic tables of contents for documents to identifying references within text. With the power of artificial intelligence, HURIDOCS hopes to solve the trickiest challenges facing human rights defenders.

Source : Unlocking human rights information with machine learning