Evaluating SMS parsing using automated testing software

Mobile phones are ubiquitous with millions of users acquiring them every day for personal, business and social usage or communication. Its enormous pervasiveness has created a great advantage for its use as a technological tool applicable to overcome the challenges of information dissemination regarding burning issues, advertisement, and health related matters. Short message services (SMS), an integral functional part of cell phones, can be turned into a major tool for accessing databases of information on HIV/AIDS as appreciable percentage of the youth embrace the technology. The common features by the users of the unique language are the un-grammatical structure, convenience of spelling, homophony of words and alphanumeric mix up of the arrangement of words. This proves it to be difficult to serve as query in the search engine architecture. In this work SMS query was used for information accessing in Frequently Asked Question FAQ system under a specified medical domain. Finally, when the developed system was measured in terms of proximity to the answer retrieved remarkable results were observed

Text messaging and retrieval techniques for a mobile health information system

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

Short message service normalization for communication with a health information system

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDShort Message Service (SMS) is one of the most popularly used services for communication between mobile phone users. In recent times it has also been proposed as a means for information access. However, there are several challenges to be overcome in order to process an SMS, especially when it is used as a query in an information retrieval system.SMS users often tend deliberately to use compacted and grammatically incorrect writing that makes the message difficult to process with conventional information retrieval systems. To overcome this, a pre-processing step known as normalization is required. In this thesis an investigation of SMS normalization algorithms is carried out. To this end,studies have been conducted into the design of algorithms for translating and normalizing SMS text. Character-based, unsupervised and rule-based techniques are presented. An investigation was also undertaken into the design and development of a system for information access via SMS. A specific system was designed to access information related to a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database in healthcare, using a case study. This study secures SMS communication, especially for healthcare information systems. The proposed technique is to encipher the messages using the secure shell (SSH) protocol