Three data scientists at Nikkei Inc. won gold medals in a machine learning competition held by Kaggle, the world's largest data science community. The event was called the "U.S. Patent Phrase to Phrase Matching" competition ( https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/us-patent-phrase-to-phrase-matching ), and the Nikkei competitors placed 8th out of 1,889 teams.

The team consisted of Mr. Ryosuke Sakurai and Mr. Taro Masuda from the Business Information Services Unit and Mr. Masaki Aota from the Nikkei Innovation Lab. Mr. Sakurai and Mr. Masuda were awarded the title of "Kaggle Master" while Mr. Aota was named a "Kaggle Expert."

The main focus of this competition was natural language processing. Specifically, participants competed in terms of their abilities to predict the similarities between two phrases, taking into account their context in the field of patents. The solutions of the team are explained in a Japanese blog ( https://hack.nikkei.com/blog/kaggle202207/ ). The competition ended on June 20th.

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

This is the second time for Nikkei employees to be honored with gold medals in a Kaggle competition. In 2019, the team of Mr. Shotaro Ishihara from the Nikkei Innovation Lab won first place in the "PetFinder.my Adoption Prediction" competition. ( https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/petfinder-adoption-prediction ).

Nikkei has made a conscious effort to contribute to the Kaggle community. In 2019, Nikkei hosted a competition at Kaggle Days Tokyo ( https://www.kaggle.com/c/kaggle-days-tokyo ), an on-site event held by Kaggle. In addition, Mr. Ishihara has published several Kaggle-related books.

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.