Nearly 800,000 missing children reports are registered worldwide every year. This is sadly only a fraction of the actual number of children who go missing or are found lost across the globe. Although these cases are reported to the police, in countries like India, often it is found that they are not given the attention they urgently need. Our inspiration behind this project was to help in this situation by providing a platform where urgent information regarding a missing child or a lost child found somewhere can be spread across social media quickly and widely so that it can be brought to everyone's attention as soon as possible.
The ReuniteBot is a twitter bot that:
- Likes and retweets the posts across twitter with hashtags related to missing and lost children.
- Tags and mentions important authorities to grab urgent attention and receive help.
- Uses location of the original post to determine which authorities to contact. We have tried contacting NGOs for shelter for lost children without families and the police authorities and government for missing children.
- Removes irrelavent and unnecessary posts that aren't related to missing or lost children but have these hashtags.
- Uses NLP to classify posts into three categories: 1) Missing Children 2) Lost Children 3) Unrelated
- We faced difficulty in finding a good Machine Learning model with high accuracy to classify posts.
- We faced difficulty in learning to tag handles on twitter using twitter API
- We had to learn vectorizing ML model so that our tweet objects could be put into them.
- We found it very challenging to incorporate the location feature of Twitter Bot.
- We would like to expand the location feature to every state in India. Currently we only have few locations.
- We would like to use NLP further to extract contact information like email ids, mobile numbers, name directly from tweet text.
- We would like to use deep learning to match up tweets that are from missing and lost children categories using image processing.
- This twitter Bot can be extended to helping missing and lost people in general and not just children.
- We would also like to add in a feature of providing emotional support to parents of missing children using chatbots.