My Summer Internship Project & Experience at UST India
I joined UST India as a Software intern in February 2021. Before moving forward I would like to mention that UST India is a subsidiary of UST Global, a globally leading IT solutions company. It works in various dimensions of technology from offering SAP, ERP solutions to Cloud Cloud Solutions to Business Intelligence. They provide their services to almost every sector/ field.
Training
During my internship at UST India, I went through a 1-month intense training where I learned many machine learning & NLP concepts. Not only the concepts were told, but their implementation was also a part of training. I was given small tasks related to Machine Learning & NLP which I had to do with proper methodology & later explain the method I chose & why I chose it. This training helped me sharpen my Machine Learning skills, which I gained during my college & personal projects. My mentors evaluated my performance based on which I was further assigned tasks.
About the Project
I was assigned a real-life problem statement that had many uses. I had to design & create a tool using which we can analyze/identify a person’s personality based on his social media or any data/captions that he/she has provided.
Initially, I was supposed to identify the need of the project. So that I should understand why we are doing a task before doing it. I identified that when personality tests are usually in the form of questionnaire/MCQs where a person is asked some set of questions & based on their answers, the personality traits are identified. But when a person knows that he is going through some tests the behavior changes & the answer he gives might not be the true answers & the final personality prediction might get wrong. This personality identification is important sometimes to know about someone, to understand their behavior, their feelings, how he/she is going to act in a particular situation. Sometimes it is required to test mental health & sometimes it might also be used to do a large-scale analysis like knowing what kind of personality people follow a person or take some decision, etc.
Working on the project
Starting this project was a difficult task & it had to be difficult as we were trying to solve real-world problems. So we did a lot of research around human personality. After doing a lot of research we came across a new idea to predict human personality traits. We came across the Big 5 Personality traits where 5 basic dimensions of personality traits represent a personality. These 5 traits are shown below in the diagram.
At that time we thought of predicting the value of each dimension/trait as a binary (1 or 0).
We collected data from various sources related to big 5 personality traits & made a model that could predict the personality traits using various NLP and Machine Learning Techniques.
The flow chart of the complete process is as shown below :
In between, many things were done like comparison among various embeddings from which we chose one best suitable embedding for our case.
Also, the pre-processing consisted of many techniques like removing stop words, lemmatization, stemming, irregularities removal & many more as shown below:
All these things helped me in arriving at the results & I was able to deliver a tool that could help identify a person’s personality traits.
Interaction & Guidance
We practiced Agile where we all used to discuss the progress, difficulties, next tasks & many more every day. I received good guidance & learnings from my mentors. They had a friendly nature & were easy to communicate with.
My Learnings & Challenges
There were a lot of challenges in this project, as we just had the problem statement & not much work has been done in this direction. We had to find our way & methodology to create a tool like this that would help people. Other Challenges included communication, due to the pandemic as we all know we were working from home. This communication gap slowed our pace but yes, at last, we were able to achieve the results & the product we wanted to achieve.
As we all know learning in tech is a never-ending process & there is a lot to learn. I learned how to see things in a different way including different Libraries, APIs, Making UI, and reading research papers. One of the most interesting things I have learned is about AutoML which I’ll surely explore more in near future.
I am grateful to UST India & Bennett University for providing me with this learning opportunity. Also, I would like to thank Dr. A.K Sinha & Dr. Deepak Garg for helping me throughout this journey.
