Kaggle Grandmaster 2021

On August 27, 2021, Upstage won a gold medal at Kaggle's 'CommonLit Readability Prize' competition, producing Korea's 6th Grandmaster. The competition was hosted by CommonLit, a U.S. nonprofit education technology organization, and the challenge was to build a machine learning algorithm that automatically determines text difficulty to match the reading level of elementary, middle, and high school students.

The competition ran for about 3 months starting in May, with over 3,600 teams participating. The Upstage team (led by Kim Sang-hoon, with Kim Yoon-soo) improved performance by combining existing statistical features such as sentence length, word count, and part-of-speech information with a language model to reflect the overall context of the text.

The achievements were notable.

• Master Kim Yoon-soo became Korea's youngest 6th Kaggle Grandmaster with this gold medal.
• As an undergraduate at Seoul National University, he gained hands-on experience and mentoring through Upstage's Global Residency program, and on that foundation earned 5 gold medals and reached 24th in the Kaggle global ranking.
• Leader Kim Sang-hoon, who led this competition, ranks 15th in the Kaggle global ranking and became Korea's 3rd Grandmaster in 2020.

Separately, Upstage developed KLUE, an open dataset for Korean natural language understanding, and also released the KLUE leaderboard, which measures the performance of Korean AI models. Through these activities, the company stated its plan to grow the Korean NLP research ecosystem and cultivate globally competitive AI talent.