Machine Learning Powered Content Moderation: Computer Vision Applications at Expedia

Historically, we carried out content moderation using third party vendors, but with the increasing volume of the images (and text content) we started to automate as much of this work as possible with the help of machine learning models. In the next few sections, we will provide an overview of our modeling framework, data collection, and evaluation frameworks. One challenge we faced when we started this project was the lack of enough labeled data with granular categories for user generated content. In the past, Expedia teams labeled content using crowd-sourcing, but in many cases we found that images had only been labeled as approved or rejected without specifying the reason. This meant we lacked the training data to inform models why an image was rejected (an image can be rejected because it had low quality, or because it contains identifiable children, or for many other reasons).