Māori loanwords project becomes easier with machine learning

A machine learning model was used by researchers from the University of Waikato, in New Zealand, to narrow down a massive 8 million tweets to a more manageable 1.2 million in order to look at how te reo Māori is being used in the genre. According to a recent press release, the team focused on 77 Māori loanwords, or te reo Māori words used in an English context, and used them as training data for their machine learning model. Machine learning allows data scientists to provide a computer with a large data set, and teach it to make predictions based on that data. The initial 8 million tweets contained a fair bit of distracting data'noise'. The irrelevant tweets are those that are not used in a New Zealand English context, or were otherwise unrelated.