Yellow Pages are directories that source information about various commercial organizations like their addresses, phone contact and other details. These are very useful and are used by individual and other business houses. Until recently, the only way to access these yellow pages directory information was to physically look into a huge hardcopy directory, which was not only laborious but also time consuming and required the user to be familiar with the organization of the directory. More recently, there have been IVR based contact centers that have been set up which can be used by the users to query information. While it is easier than browsing through the physical directory, it still has several pitfalls. The time spent on trying to get the information is quite large and at the end of enquiry one is not sure if one will get the information that one is looking for. In this paper, we propose a novel method (which has been implemented for a major telecom operator) of accessing the yellow pages directory information on the mobile phone by sending a short message service (SMS). The central idea of the proposed method is to avoid any constraint on the way the user can query the yellow pages directory except that it be in natural English. The system, which uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques, understands the intent of the query and intelligently searches the yellow pages directory to retrieve information. This retrieved information is then sent back to the user in the form of a SMS.
See Full PDF See Full PDFYellow Pages are directories that source information about various commercial organizations like their addresses, phone contact and other details. These are very useful and are used by individual and other business houses. Until recently, the only way to access these yellow pages directory information was to physically look into a huge hardcopy directory, which was not only laborious but also time consuming and required the user to be familiar with the organization of the directory. More recently, there have been IVR based contact centers that have been set up which can be used by the users to query information. While it is easier than browsing through the physical directory, it still has several pitfalls. The time spent on trying to get the information is quite large and at the end of enquiry one is not sure if one will get the information that one is looking for. In this paper, we propose a novel interface which enables accessing the yellow pages directory information on the mobile phone by sending a short message service (SMS). The central idea of the proposed method is to avoid any constraint on the way the user can query the yellow pages directory except that it be in natural English. The system, which uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques, understands the intent of the query and intelligently searches the yellow pages directory to retrieve information. This retrieved information is then sent back to the user in the form of a SMS.
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The home page of a company is an effective means for show casing their products and technology. Companies invest major effort, time and money in designing their web pages to enable their user's to access information they are looking for as quickly and as easily as possible. In spite of all these efforts, it is not uncommon for a user to spend a sizable amount of time trying to retrieve the particular information that he is looking for. Today, he has to go through several hyperlink clicks or manually search the pages displayed by the site search engine to get to the information that he is looking for. Much time gets wasted if the required information does not exist on that website. With websites being increasingly used as sources of information about companies and their products, there is need for a more convenient interface. In this paper we discuss a system based on a set of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques which addresses this problem. The system enables a user to ask for information from a particular website in free style natural English. The NLP based system is able to respond to the query by 'understanding' the intent of the query and then using this understanding to retrieve relevant information from its unstructured info-base or structured database for presenting it to the user. The interface is called UniqliQ as it avoids the user having to click through several hyperlinked pages. The core of UniqliQ is its ability to understand the question without formally parsing it. The system is based on identifying key-concepts and keywords and then using them to retrieve information. This approach enables UniqliQ framework to be used for different input languages with minimal architectural changes. Further, the key-concept – keyword approach gives the system an inherent ability to provide approximate answers in case the exact answers are not present in the information database.
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Mobile phones have been identified as one of the technologies that can be used to overcome the challenges of information dissemination regarding serious diseases. Short message services, a much used function of cell phones, for example, can be turned into a major tool for accessing databases. This paper focuses on the design and development of a short message services-based information access algorithm to carefully screen information on human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome within the context of a frequently asked questions system. However, automating the short message services-based information search and retrieval poses significant challenges because of the inherent noise in its communications. The developed algorithm was used to retrieve the best-ranked question–answer pair. Results were evaluated using three metrics: average precision, recall and computational time. The retrieval efficacy was measured and it was confirmed that there was a significant improvement in the results of the proposed algorithm when compared with similar retrieval algorithms. Keywords frequently asked question (FAQ); information retrieval (IR); mobile health (mHealth); mobile Health Information system; question and answer (Q&A) system; short message service (SMS)/text message
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Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia - MUM '08
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