Ioana Pristoleanu Undergraduate Dissertation 2014/15

Mobile App for an Interactive Pedestrian Campus Tour

Supervised by R.Gaizauskas

Abstract

The aim of this project is to develop a mobile application for Android phones, to be used by The University of Sheffield's visitors, students and staff. They will be able to interact with a text and speech driven interface which can provide information about different points of interest, departments and staff members, and also give directions to a desired destination and answer specific questions. The application consists of three main parts: a mobile interface with GPS location, dialogue manager and knowledge base with question answering, the last being what this report focuses on. We succeeded in designing and implementing all the components to make the desired app come to life. In order to provide the knowledge base and question answering, I managed to plan and achieve a system that automatically acquires, stores and retrieves desired information from various sources and uses a server to communicate with the other components.