An SMS Based Querying System for Mobile Learning

Abstract

Mobile phone is the most widely used mobile device. Every mobile phone user can conveniently communicate with each other through SMS (Short Message Service) text messages at very low price. It is so commonly used that, in some countries like China, an SMS culture has emerged. Although there are some SMS based applications in m-Learning, most of them are only for administrative purposes, like delivering messages to students as reminders or alerts for some learning activities. In fact, text messages of SMS can effectively convey small pieces of materials related to learning processes, like course notes, items of glossary, small pieces of explanation and some links to detailed information etc. In this paper, we introduce a system for querying information and knowledge by the use of SMS in a mobile learning environment. The proposed system consists of a GSM Module (GSMM), a Dialogue Control Module (DCM), a Querying Processing Module (QPM) and a Knowledge Base (KB). GSMM includes a micro-controller and a GSM communication device with a SIM card in it. It processes the users' messages according to our defined protocol and acts as the interface between the mobile infrastructure and the rest of the system. DCM handles the content of the requesting messages and produces suitable querying tasks for QPM, which in turn searches and matches information from KB or Internet to produce suitable answering messages for the users according to their requesting messages. To help the system better understand the content of messages, natural language processing and theme recognition techniques are applied to message processing modules. Several scenarios about course notes and glossary querying are illustrated in this paper.