Under project BG-RRP-2.004-0008 “Digitalization of SMEs”, Assoc. Prof. Boryana Pelova and Dr. Gloria Hristova conducted research on the development of a conceptual framework based on NLP techniques. The letter is designed to measure how effective the digitalization of SMEs is. The research delivers an ML-based AI system that integrates economic theory fundamentals and builds upon the classical approach.

The early results of this research were presented in 2023 at two international conferences (AMEE’23 and EBES Hungary). The authors refined their solution and documented their major findings in the paper „ML-based AI Conceptual Framework for Assessing SMEs Digitalization through the Lens of Sentiment Analysis“. The paper was presented at the Third International Conference on Digitalization and Management Innovation 2024 held in Beijing at the end of October.

Assoc. Prof. Pelova presented the key paper findings and Dr. Hristova took online participation in the discussions. The expressed interest to their results and the fruitful Q&A session won them the “Best oral presentation award”. The latter reflects the vote of conference participants. In this edition of the conference, they were from all over the world. The paper went through the process of blind peer review and it will be published in the special issue of the indexed journal „Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications“.