Jonathan Valentine, the founder of Impero, is one of the brains behind a new kind of software program which is being used in schools to monitor the behavior of students who might be self-harming, engaging in under-age sexual activity and bullying via online media.
Language develops fast and there’s nothing which develops at such a pace, particularly amongst young people, than slang. UK teachers have, for a long time, found it difficult to keep up with the continuously renovating trends of modern slang which students incorporate into their daily lives as a means of communicating with each other, both online and offline.
Why has Impero developed this slang decoder software?
The fear of many teachers, and other organizations which work to support young people in a number of ways, is that bullying and self-harm can go unnoticed when adults don’t understand the common slang terms being used by young people to communicate.
The idea behind the software program developed by Impero and so far used in 1400 schools located throughout the UK, is to help teachers and other supervising adults breakdown the coded language that young people use, to keep up-to-date with popular slang and to keep track of young people who are affected by bullying behavior or who show signs of wanting to self-harm.
How was the slang dictionary put together?
The dictionary has been organized into nine separate sections. Each section focuses on a particular issue and lists popular, modern terms used by young people when referring to sexual activity (or “sexting” – sexual activity via text message), suicide, body image, self-harm, adult content, eating disorders, bullying, racism and homophobia.
Impero took help and expert advice from a number of different sources when compiling the dictionary and programming the software. Students from Laurence Jackson School in Cleveland played a major role in the development process, particularly in helping to generate the content of the dictionary itself. However, certain organizations, including the Anti-Bullying Alliance and an eating disorder charity, called B-eat, also helped Impero generate this new software by sharing information about popular modern language trends used by the young people that they come into contact with on a daily basis.
How does the slang dictionary software work?
Impero’s software can be used by schools to automatically scan online conversations and online student activity to check for disguised bullying language or coded language used by young people to indicate that they have suicidal thoughts / desires to self-harm.
Whenever the software picks up signs of abuse or bullying in the modern slang that students are using, it records that information in the automatically generated reports that teachers can choose to download. The dictionary helps teachers to understand modern slang terms, such as “gnoc” (get naked on camera) or “dirl” (die in real life).
When teachers hear phrases in the corridors or read written words that they cannot decipher, they can also use the program as a modern slang dictionary and search for the meaning of these phrases to check whether or not they should be worried about the activity of students under their care.
What might need tweaking?
Even though the software is being used by 1400 schools across the UK and even though it has also been used successfully to track threatening gang culture behavior in the US, there are some areas of the program which still need to be refined. For example, the language used by young people is going to continue to develop. This means the dictionary will need to be kept up-to-date, which is not only time-consuming but requires lots of constant research into young people’s vernacular.
It’s also important to stipulate that slang differs across the country. This means that regional differences need to be taken into account and, at present, the software is pretty standard. The option to add words to the dictionary exists and this is a positive aspect of the program, but the difficulties of using the program on a regular basis are already clear.
