Impacters: The CV Bot Project

A good personal CV goes a long way. Impacters uses machine learning to power an interactive chatbot that helps students and professionals create CVs just by talking to a bot in an app.

I. Background

Impacters (formerly Coder Girls Initiative) aims to start a movement that encourages girls to innovate in the field of Computer Science by giving them the tools to get started and aspiring them to continue exploring. It also aspires to create an inviting place for future female tech leaders, who are given tools and support to invent and innovate in an unrestricted environment.

The CV Bot project led by Ms. Lachana Hada and supervised by Ms. Subha Laxmi Maharjan selected girls from previous machine learning events and provided them an opportunity to work on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks which is currently a popular area of research and development. A human-like processing power of information has many applications in a multitude of fields. The CV Bot was our attempt to showcase to the girls the power of machine learning and the tremendous impact it will have in the future. The girls, who worked on teams, were given an opportunity to work on different levels of product development - from conceptual development to implementation, with a professional and experienced team around them.

II. The Idea

A good personal CV goes a long way. It helps an applicant make a good first impression and thus places them in a favorable position during their applications. Sadly, it is also an extremely undervalued piece of document, especially in developing countries like Nepal. Furthermore, due to the lack of proficiency in the English language many applicants are unable to express their abilities and qualifications properly in English-based CVs, which is generally required for international applications.

The girls thus worked on an app-based Chatbot that focuses on empowering students and professionals, especially from developing countries, to create standardized CVs in English. The idea of the project is to extract information from casual conversations and sentences provided to the bot to create a map of user achievements and activities. These are later converted into a standard pdf CV format.

III. The result

Although 3 months is a very short time to build an entire product, the group was able to develop a simple language model for the CV Bot and, with the assistance of Naya, was able to build a simple app for the bot. The aim of the bot is to be used as a notekeeper for any new achievements and qualifications. Whenever a user remembers or completes something, the bot can be used to save the update right away. This way the user has a relevant CV at all times. The bot is still under active development and will be released to the public when it satisfies the MVP requirements.

Here's a quick demo video of the chatbot:

Amazing people who worked on this project: Lachana Hada, Subha Laxmi Maharjan, Sampada Sharma, Kriti Neupane, Phurkima Sherpa, Alina Dangol, Lumanti Manandhar, Abhishek Tamrakar, Rashmi Chitrakar