Two Nikkei employees received gold medals in a machine learning competition held by Kaggle, the world's largest data science community, which took place from August 31, 2022 to November 30, 2022. The event was called the "Feedback Prize - English Language Learning" competition ( https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/feedback-prize-english-language-learning ), and the Nikkei competitors placed 15th out of 2,654 teams.

The team consisted of Mr. Masaki Aota, a data scientist from Nikkei Innovation Lab, Mr. Ryo Namiki, a data journalist from Editorial Division, and a software engineer. Mr. Aota was awarded the title of "Kaggle Master".

The main focus of this competition was natural language processing. Specifically, participants competed in predictive performance, with six assessment items scored for texts written by English language learners of various levels. The solutions of the team are explained on the following web page: ( https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/feedback-prize-english-language-learning/discussion/369760 ) .

Nikkei invests in research and development for products and services that make use of large amounts of text data, such as news articles. The results of this competition not only prove our technical capabilities in natural language processing - they also allow us to apply the knowledge we have gained to our daily work.

This is the third time for Nikkei employees to be honored with gold medals in a Kaggle competition, and Nikkei currently has four Kaggle Masters as employees.

About Kaggle

Kaggle is the world's largest online community of users focusing on data science and machine learning, and its members come from around the world. Competitions held by Kaggle are popular events that target the predictive performance of machine learning models. The title of "Kaggle Master" is considered to represent the top 1% of active users.