My First Hackathon

I recently got a chance to participate in a hackathon. This being my very first time participating I went in with an open mind. This hackathon's purpose was to introduce high school students from all backgrounds to natural language processing (NLP) and spark interest in computer science through hands-on learning. The goal was to build software projects that combined computational linguistics with real-world applications—scientific, social, or otherwise.

This hackathon was hosted by LingHacks and they also offered few classes for us to learn about computational linguistics, NLP and Pytorch - programming language for machine learning. I had one day to think about a project, do research and figure out a way to build it.

With tools like ChatGPT and Gemini becoming mainstream, computational linguistics is a rapidly growing field, and I was curious to learn how these technologies actually work. ChatGpt recevies 133 million searches daily, and we take this for granted most of the time. In reality behind the screen there is advanced computational lingustics algorthims and neural netowrks working hard.

After some research and thinking about projects that could create a social impact I decided to build an online bias detector. This tool will analyze text—sentences or paragraphs—and flag parts that may contain bias or microaggressions. For example, a sentence like “She is good at math, for a girl” would be flagged due to the implicit gender bias. The goal is to help readers better understand subtle biases that often go unnoticed.

This matters a lot in today’s world of social media, where anyone can post anything at any time. When reading political or social commentary, it’s important to recognize potential bias so we can form more informed, independent opinions—especially when it comes to voting or supporting legislation. My tool will be helpful to identify these biases in any text.

Overall, this was a fun and eye-opening experience. I got an opportunity to learn a lot about the latest technologies and how they can be used to build tools that can make positive impact in the society. I walked away with a stronger interest in NLP and a deeper understanding of the ways language and technology intersect. It even inspired me to keep building projects in this space on my own.

You can see all the details in my previous post!