Nkk2wa! Meet the social media tool that’s fluent in Filipino and text-speak

This is the Senti dashboard.

Even if the Philippines is regularly proclaimed as the social media capital of the world, what good is all that chatter for companies if they can’t understand what people are saying? Most social media tools, after all, can only decipher and analyze English. This leaves the greater majority of Filipino netizens who prefer to speak in the Tagalog vernacular crouched in the dark, away from company eyes.

Manila startup Senti wants to help Philippine companies reach those people through its proprietary platform, which promises to understand “keywords and terms in English, Filpino, Taglish, and any other variations of the language.” Those “other variations” impressively include text-speak, which often intersperses numbers with letters as in “nkk2wa” for “nakakatuwa” (something that makes you glad), and beki-speak (gay lingo), which uses a bevy of co-opted words (“anaconda”, which means “traitor”) and coined words (“deadmatologist”, which means “snob”).

According to Senti co-founder Ralph Vincent Regalado, the volume of this data is considerable because “Filipino acquires borrow words from other languages faster than English.”

After consolidating this information “from different social media streams,” Senti uses it to provide “analytics and data insights about products, events, and personalities.” This ability effectively makes it one of the first social media tools locally produced in the Philippines, making Regalado a sort of techno-linguistic pioneer.

See: Filipinos are huge adopters of technology, but not of security

Our output is better than yours

The intersection of tech and linguistics had long been an interest of co-founder Ralph Vincent Regalado. He says, “During the time I was taking my BS and MS computer science degree at De La Salle University, I was introduced to Filipino natural language processing.”

Regalado had wanted to pitch the idea for what would become Senti as early as the fourth Startup Weekend Manila, but because of scheduling conflicts, he had to wait until the fifth Startup Weekend Manila to pursue it. There, he partnered with some other attendees that complimented his skills – Regalado was tech, his co-founders were biz-dev – to develop Senti, or at least the idea for it. Together they pitched the concept of Senti, and in heroic fashion, they won the fifth Startup Weekend Manila competition.

Those co-founders are not the same people with Regalado today. “We had conflicting ideas on how to handle Senti,” he says. “Though I know that their intentions were good, there are things that you want to risk so that you’ll learn fast. This made me decide to press the reset button and start again with a new team.”

Regalado’s team may have changed – it now consists of Charibeth Cheng (Regalado’s thesis adviser during his BS and MS degree), Marc Obaldo (development lead), Arnold and Archie Choa (“our developer twins”), and Courtney Ngo (researcher) – but the dream remains the same: he wishes to unearth the riches of data buried in the Filipino languages.

To begin to understand the complexity of this task, we can look at a single word. “Take “siya” (him / her), it is also spelled as “sya” and “xa” (in text-speak),” says Senti co-founder Charibeth Cheng. “Spelling is a major challenge for Filipino because there are many variants. Filipinos also love to speak with hidden meanings, thus making language analysis more difficult.”

When pitching to potential client companies, Regalado relishes in discussing the big picture as much as he does the linguistic details:

Senti is suited to serve the Philippine market as most people use the local language when they tweet or post. It gives a better view of what consumers really feel about a specific brand. Understanding the local language and contextualizing data to fit the Philippine market makes our output more useful for local companies.

Senti as a telepath