Discord Bot: Radar

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  Radar Discord profile

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  Microaggressions education module

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  Example of a response to user microaggression

Inspiration

Recently, my management class had a passionate discussion about microaggressions. Hearing about my classmates' experiences really opened my eyes to the impact that comments we might pass off as "nothing much" or "just a joke" can have on a person's mental health and self-esteem. I was inspired to do more research and leverage technology to take a stand against microaggressions.

What it does

Radar is a Discord bot trained to identify microaggressions in messages. Based on the category of microaggression, Radar then provides a specific explanation of why a user's comments were harmful. The bot also comes with an interactive learning module that educates users about different types of microaggressions.

How I built it

Radar was built entirely in Python. I used NLTK to parse my training dataset, then I trained my logistic regression model using scikit-learn. My logistic regression classifies a message by determining if it is clean or if it falls into one of the identified microaggression categories. If so, the bot responds to the microaggression with a warning and explanation. I crafted the user-bot interactions with discord.py. In addition to the bot's automatic response system, users can manually interact with the bot to take a learning module and increase their own awareness of microaggressions. The learning module advances as the user clicks emoji depending on the path they want to take.

Challenges I ran into

Most of my past experience pertains to web development, so diving headfirst into Discord bots was a challenging experience (but no less thrilling). There were so many event listeners that I didn't know where to start, from on_reaction_add to on_raw_reaction_add to wait_for(reaction_add). It definitely took me some time and testing, testing, testing to figure out what I needed! Then, I couldn't find a training dataset that fit my needs, so I had to compile my own training dataset based on examples that I found through research.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I expanded my horizons. At first, I was thinking about doing data visualization, which I'm already comfortable with. But I decided to take a different direction, and I'm happy that I got the bot up and running!

What I learned

I learned how to respond to user events using the Discord API. In the process, I learned a lot about how Discord protects their users' data, including OAuth2, tokens, and privileged intents.

What's next for Discord Bot: Radar

I want to compile even more data, because microaggressions come in so many forms that my current dataset is nowhere near complete. With a more comprehensive dataset, I can more rigorously train my algorithm to differentiate between user messages and increase Radar's effectiveness. I also want to add more educational content and the ability to report a microaggression to server moderators if the bot doesn't catch it.

Built With

• discord.py
• python
• scikit-learn