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Harmony on Kaggle

Harmony on Kaggle

Harmony launches on Kaggle!

We are proud to have launched our first competition on Kaggle!

The primary challenge of this competition is to develop an AI tool or method that can accurately extract questionnaire questions from documents, primarily PDFs.

This competition offers a unique opportunity for participants to contribute to the field of natural language processing and document analysis as well as open source for social science while developing solutions that have real-world applications. We encourage participants to think creatively, leverage available resources, and push the boundaries of current technologies.

Try Kaggle

Try your hand at our competition

Kaggle Github repo

Check out the Github repo associated with the Kaggle competition and the tagged PDF data

Entering the Kaggle competition

Requirements: Python 3.10 or greater

  1. Create an account on Kaggle.

  2. Install Kaggle on your computer:

pip install kaggle
  1. On the Kaggle website, download your kaggle.json file and put it in your home folder under .kaggle/kaggle.json.

  2. Download and unzip the competition data:

kaggle competitions download -c harmony-pdf-and-word-questionnaires-extract
unzip harmony-pdf-and-word-questionnaires-extract.zip 
  1. Run create_sample_submission.py in the folder containing your data to create your train and test predictions:

To generate predictions for the training data and write to train_predictions.csv:

python create_sample_submission.py train

To evaluate the train predictions:

python evaluate_train_results.py
  1. To modify the prediction logic or inject your own model, you can edit the function dummy_extract_questions.

  2. To generate predictions for the test data and write to submission.csv:

python create_sample_submission.py test
  1. Submit your CSV file to Kaggle
kaggle competitions submit -c harmony-pdf-and-word-questionnaires-extract -f submission.csv -m "Message"

Related Posts

Improving Harmony's PDF extraction with user testing

Improving Harmony's PDF extraction with user testing

Since we built Harmony, a common complaint has been that it frequently identifies the wrong questions in PDFs. The original algorithm for finding questions in PDFs was a mixture of rule based heuristics and some hand coded logic to look for e.g. lines in the document which begin with numbers. This was very fragile and worked fine on short questionnaires such as the GAD-7, but failed on larger documents. We decided to run a competition with our partner DOXA AI where members of the public could train their own model to extract questions from PDFs.
Harmony at MQ and DataMind Data Science Workshop

Harmony at MQ and DataMind Data Science Workshop

Harmony at MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop On 2 May 2025, Dr Eoin McElroy demonstrated Harmony at the MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop in Deutsche Bank. Eoin’s presentation focused on “Maximising the use of existing survey data: facilitating cross-study research using retrospective harmonization.” The workshop brought together researchers interested in applying novel harmonisation techniques to existing datasets. Eoin explained traditional harmonisation processes and presented a user-friendly guide to the Harmony tool, demonstrating how natural language processing can streamline the harmonisation process.

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