Tisane Labs
p/tisane-labs
No more unstructured. No more foreign
Vadim Berman
Tisane API — Detect hate speech, cyberbullying, and more in 27 languages
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Harness the power of next-generation AI to extract more from text in 27 languages: detect hate speech, sexual harassment, cyberbullying, extract topics, and find not just whether, but also why the customer is happy or unhappy with your product or service.

Replies
Jarod Stewart
Wondering how close this gets to censorship. Obviously, we do not want to encourage hate speech or slander but at what cost? How much training data do you have that is based on slang?
Vadim Berman
@stewartjarod Yes, of course, it's an inevitable (and a very good) question. But note that this is an API, a tool. Pardon the gruesome analogy, but it is as close to censorship as a kitchen knife to murder. However, we do have responsibility to encourage good practices and prevent misuse. We need to define solid criteria what the hate speech means, and some people would find ours lax, but very few people would find it disputable. Here is our criteria: http://tisane.ai/knowledgebase/b... . Note that an attack on a majority demographic group is also an attack. Note that we do not strive to detect even "mostly universally offensive opinions" (e.g. "Hitler did nothing wrong"). It's both technically challenging and bound to generate arguments. We might create that capability in the future for customised installations but that will not make it into the core, publicly exposed API. In general, if you're curious about the subject, you might want to read the article we posted about the advanced types of sentiment analysis: https://medium.com/tisanelabs/ev... (the last part, about politics). We were also asked about how to handle culture-specific exceptions (e.g. in a country with shariah laws, "women should not be allowed to drive" might not be considered bigotry); the simple answer is, the calling application receives annotations, but it may ignore specific cases (plus, again, the system comes with extensive customisation capabilities). The personal attacks are easier. "Your opinion sucks" is not an attack; "you suck" is an attack. As for the technical implementation, at this point, we'd rather not talk too much about it. Let's just say the history of the R&D is far longer than the history of Tisane Labs.
Christopher Leach
@vadimberman I understand immigrants being protected, but with the line being blurred between a legal and illegal immigrant what’s the definition in this case?
Vadim Berman
@leachy114 An interesting nuance, but no distinction. On the technical level, there is no way we can go over every statute and law all over the world and configure the system to distinguish "good" and "bad" immigrants. Then some people might say, that visa makes immigrants not cool and this visa is OK (e.g. "trailing spouses", refugees, etc.). There is no way we'll want to or be able to get into that. (Again, I'm going to send you to the article in Medium which explains that in the political sentiment analysis, "good" and "bad" is relative to the reviewer's set of beliefs.) On the practical level, I don't think it'll make a huge difference. If someone says, "all illegal immigrants are thieves / stupid / etc." that means assigning a negative attribute to an entire group, so while it might be slightly outside of the intended scope, I'll be fine if it's tagged as hate speech. An utterance like "we shouldn't let illegal immigrants in" will definitely **not** be tagged as "hate speech" (and so "we shouldn't let legal immigrants in"), so I think that should be OK with everyone. As the Dude put it, "Yeah, that's, like, your opinion, man" :) . Regardless of the technical obstacles - which are not trivial, may I say - we don't view our mission as making people to adhere to some kind of views or beliefs (and given the fact that we handle so many languages, it's plain impossible). We merely want the Internet to stop being Wild West and start being a modern city where people don't attack each other on sight.
Jarod Stewart
@vadimberman thank you for the thoughtful reply. 👍I am definitely gonna dig into your blog a bit. 😄 Essentially, APIs don't kill free speech, API integrators do.
Vadim Berman
@stewartjarod That's a nice one 😉 .
Noor
Adding this to community platform should help people do more meaningful conversation. I think you should have a sort of plugin that people can just use it without having a deep tech background.
Vadim Berman
@nooruzzonline Thanks and yes, of course. But we're in the API business, so we simply collaborate with the existing comment engines (some reached out to us after this ProductHunt posting!). Just like the functionality relevant in the marketing space: Synup where you work can integrate the opinion analysis.
Noor
@vadimberman True. We're planning to build a tool internally and I guess this will make my life a whole lot more easier.
Vadim Berman
@nooruzzonline Not going to hard-sell, but you're more than welcome to explore, and we can direct you in the proper direction. With the generous free plan, it will cost you nothing to experiment!
David Kofoed Wind

The demo doesn't work but throws an error. Can't get the Python version to run either. The documentation is poor. There is no automatic language detection (if it worked).

Seems like a perfect example of a great technology hidden in a really poor product package. Why not use one the API marketplaces for something like this?

Pros:

Sounds really promising with multi-language support

Cons:

Doesn't work at all.

Vadim Berman
Hi David, thank you for your comment. We're sorry it did not work for you; we fixed your issue and deployed the update, like promised. We apologise for the delay and the fact that Singapore and Denmark are so far apart in terms of time zones. As for the automatic language detection, this is in the roadmap but it is rather dangerous to use on very short messages. Think of a word like "status"; it's the same word in English, Spanish, and many other languages. If you have this sole word as an input, what language would you put there?
Ilango Rajagopal
This is really cool! I would love to use this for a side project at some point. This might seem far-fetched but any plans to extend this to images/videos? To detect nudity, offensive signs etc?
Vadim Berman
@rajagopalilango Thanks and unfortunately, no. We only deal with text, but I'm sure there are services to detect nudity and offensive gestures.
harish ramani
Is there a way to contribute for training or test data?! And would the product be open sourced ?! ( My guess is no, but what's the harm in asking )
Siranush Hovhannisyan
cool
Ana Topoljski
Hi Makers of Tisane API! Is the Slovene language also available?
Ana Topoljski
@owenfar1 Thanks! We might be a small country, but I do get the feeling that we do find our way around here!😀😇
Vadim Berman
@ana_topoljski Hi Ana! Sorry, no Slovene yet. Having said that, the effort of adding a new language is within a scope of a small to mid-size project, so we'll be happy to start a conversation and evaluate your needs / effort. You can go via our Contact Form or directly to me (vadim dot berman at tisane dot ai).
Sam
Really interesting product, and I'd love to use this for a product at somepoint. However, it doesn't seem the most accurate at the minute. I've used the demo and it wasn't picking up a lot of what I was saying. I'm looking forward to seeing this grow!
Vadim Berman
@recon Thanks, Sam! There is, of course, lots of room for improvement, and like any other product, it will improve over the initial level. The general idea with the abuse detection though is to pick enough to deter potential offenders; just like the police does not aim to catch every criminal, there will be always someone to slip through the cracks. We don't aim to reach the "clean room" level, more like to help make the discourse more human.
Vladimyr Yeremenko
A couple of years ago I was looking for something similar, I did not find it( Great idea, success!
Marko Bonaći
I'm more of a free speech guy, so I don't see where this could be applied.
Gee
How can I integrate this into my new social media app?
Vadim Berman
@geeblack_ sign up to the API, then simply use it on the content your users post. As for the business logic, this is up to you. You can either invoke it before posting (e.g. warning the user if they transgressed your policies), or forward the suspicious ones as alerts.
Chris Mendosa
unique capabilities. actually captures abuse
Michał Waszczyk
What phase is the project currently in?
Vadim Berman
@michal_waszczyk1 Hi Michał, Tisane has reached profitability and is now growing, adding customers. If you have any questions or additional details, please feel free to connect in LinkedIn (I sent an invite).