SMS based natural language interface to yellow pages directory

  • Authors:
  • Sunil Kumar Kopparapu;Akhilesh Srivastava;Arun Pande

  • Affiliations:
  • Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Yantra Park, Thane (West), India;Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Yantra Park, Thane (West), India;Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Yantra Park, Thane (West), India

  • Venue:
  • Mobility '07 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on mobile technology, applications, and systems and the 1st international symposium on Computer human interaction in mobile technology
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

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 hard-copy 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 long 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.