Happenings

Inspiration

Last week, we were really stressed about classes, and all we wanted to do was pet puppies. Unfortunately, the Puppy Lab email was drowned out in all the other event advertisements, so we wanted to make a way for us to visualize where and when events are happening on campus.

What it does

Happenings pulls event information from emails and plots them onto a time-changing map of MIT

How we built it

We used the spaCy NLP library to process emails, and displayed the resulting events using Google Maps.

Challenges we ran into

Information extraction is a difficult task, especially from unstructured text, so the events we pulled from emails would often be nonsensical.

What we learned

We learned some basics about NLP and various methods of information extraction people have used in the past.

What's next for Happenings

We'd like to improve the NLP model, possibly by producing more training data to improve the accuracy of event extraction.

Built With

• javascript
• natural-language-processing
• python
• react