Short message service normalization for communication with a health information system

Abstract

Short 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.