Interfax data case among most in demand at Digital Breakthrough hackathon

An Interfax AI case for analysis and processing of texts using machine and deep learning technology was one of the most in demand during the "Creative Industries. Communications and Content" hackathon which was part of the Digital Breakthrough competition.

Digital Breakthrough is a project of the presidential platform Russia - Land of Opportunity. The overarching goal of the competition is to build an IT community culture by promoting the best participants, as well as creating effective means of social mobility in Russia.

Based on Interfax's data case, competitors had to develop a generator of titles for news stories that are automatically collected by the company's neural network. The stories are selections of news articles on the same topic, such as "Olympics 2020," or "State Duma Elections 2021."

"Our tasks in news robotization are constantly expanding today. Algorithms already write more than 20% of the news on Interfax's financial feeds, and we are constantly increasing this share. During the hackathon we offered one of the practical tasks that we solve as part of automation," said Vladimir Gerasimov, a member of the competition jury and First Deputy General Director of Interfax Group.

"The contest participants tested more than ten hypotheses, developed several prototypes proving the concept of the headline generator, and gave an excellent presentation of the results of their work. The winners showed promising options for solving the case in the form of a full-fledged product," said Evgeny Klimov, a member of the contest jury and Deputy General Director for Information Technologies at Interfax Group, speaking of the hackathon results.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies are also used by Interfax in the SCAN reputation management and media analysis system, Klimov said.

Digital Breakthrough annually brings together technology entrepreneurs, representatives of federal and regional government agencies, digital technology professionals and students from specialized post-secondary institutions. The project is supported by leading Russian companies such as Rosatom, Rostelecom , Rosseti , Mail.ru Group and Sber , as well as dozens of others.

In 2019, the final Digital Breakthrough hackathon became the largest competition of IT professionals in the world and made it into the Guinness World Records. More than 3,000 IT professionals from 77 regions of Russia took part in the event simultaneously.

In 2021, the hackathons are not linked to federal districts, like before, but to industries and sectors of the economy, which will make solutions applicable in practice and concentrated in one semi-final. Participants will now be given three types of case assignments: technical, managerial and data cases.

Interfax Group is Russia's largest non-governmental information group, having created the advanced information and analytical systems that help businesses manage risks and work with data efficiently. The group includes one of the most well-known and most cited Russian news agencies in the world, Interfax, which has been covering the news for more than 30 years.