Natural Language Processing Services for the Android Mobile Platform

Smart Phones are fast becoming ever-present personal assistants – personal assistants which become more useful and productive with the inclusion of Natural Language Processing power. For many users, smart phones have become their go-to device for industry news feeds, checking email, and scheduling their agenda. The sheer quantity of text which is read on these devices, and the number of screen-taps needed to get things done, can be reduced by applying existing Natural Language Processing pipelines such as automatic summarization to news feeds, emails or attachments. Summarized text can also be consumed in an eyes-free manner using the smart phone’s Text To Speech capabilities. Dates, locations, and people can automatically detected using Named Entity Recognition and integrated in the creation of new events in a user’s agenda. iLanguage Lab is a Montreal start-up which seeks to put Natural Language Processing in the pockets of consumers, by combining software engineering with field linguistics to build Open Source language-independent Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction pipelines, test on Inuktitut, English and French. In this work, we will bring sophisticated NLP to Android devices and their users, by designing a cloud computing architecture that brokers NLP services through web services.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Rene Witte

Student:

Bahar Sateli

Partner:

iLanguage Lab

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

Concordia University