Speech Language Engineering System for Automatic Generation of Web based User Forms Imran Sarwar Bajwa
Waqar Aslam
Syed Irfan Hyder
Faculty of Computer & Emerging Sciences Balochistan University of IT and MS, Quetta
Department of Computer Science & Information Technology The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur
PAF-Karachi Institute of Economics and Technology, Karachi
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract Designing user forms for dynamic web pages is a time consuming task for experts and tricky job for novel users. Natural language processing provides an easy interface to the novel users to handle the cumbersome computer applications. The designed system incorporates this vigorous ability of natural language processing based automated system. User forms basically allow the user to input information and also get back the particular response. User interacts with a web system by using various parts of a user form. A web page not actually needs the visual components but a well-designed form with good scripts for processing the business data. A well designed form is a tool for collecting and distributing information for user. The designed system helps to automatically generate some desired web user forms. User only provides his particular business related requirements in the form of simple English text. The designed system bases on a rule based algorithm which reads the user requirements, understand the scenario, extracts the required information and then at the last automatically generates some sample web user forms. User can use them with proper adjustments. This automated system can really save the time of the user and web designer to design the user forms. Keywords: Human Computer Interaction, Automatic User forms Design, Text understanding, Language Engineering,
1. Introduction User entry forms are one of the major tools for collecting user–related information. User forms are useful in many ways as for collecting large quantities of statistical or otherwise quantifiable information, applying for surveys, various signup mechanisms, login mechanisms and miscellaneous search mechanisms [3]. User entry forms are an easy source for colleting information not only for user‟s point of view but also according to the web
designer as he has to manipulate information in various applications as for sake of record keeping and report generation purposes [5]. Some of the applications are very complex and also require lot of efforts during their design. As web designing is one of the important software engineering fields and to design a successful and excellent website is real technical task. The aspect of Web designing is constituted of various facets as the web stuffing, web technology, web visuals and web based money matters [2]. Web stuffing is basically related to the actual data contents, information and statistics which are heart and soul of a web page. On the other hands a particular Web technology provides the actual functionality of a website in the shape of forms, reports, and dynamic web contents generation. Web visuals typically define the shape and outline of a website and it is a major tool to interact user to the website. In the last, the web economics contributes the economics rectifications where required [1]. The web economics provides the facility to perform online business transactions. The major prominence of the conducted research is to provide an automatic facility to the user so that he may himself provide his requirements and preference at his own and may generate his required and desired output of the user forms. The key issue was to facilitate the novel users who do not have expertise in major web tools. A user form is basically composition of various types of ActiveX controls used for both input and output functions [4]. Major components often used are input text boxes, command buttons, option buttons, radio buttons, lists and combo boxes. The physical arrangement of these components and the written HTML code working behind them is real time-consuming task. Various ActiveX components are used for various purposes. User forms can be more interactive and easy to process if they are designed according to the approved norms and conventions.
2. Problem statement Conventional styles of designing user entry forms is little tedious task and also time consuming job. On the other hand highly skillful and expert person is required to design the user forms. The un-effective layout of user entry forms may cause problem for the user during the filling of the forms. The difficult user interface in the form of user forms can be quite troublesome and ineffective for a website. A website can be really unproductive and futile if the users face difficulty in filling forms.
3. Problem’s Solution To address the depicted problem, an automated system is required which is adequately intelligent to generate the user entry forms according to the user requirements and in no time. The intended research project “Speech Language Engineering Framework for Automatic Generation of User Forms” helps to automatically generate the user forms according to the user‟s given requirement and guidelines. To generate the forms a particular user only has to provide his particular business related requirements in the form of simple English text. The designed system uses a rule based algorithm which reads the user requirements, comprehends the given text, digs out the required information and then eventually generates the user forms. User can use them with proper adjustments. This automated system can really save the time of the user and web designer for later web designing process and a support for the novel web-designers.
4. Literature Review Automatic Web based user entry forms generation is not an old field of work. Work from last few years has been started in this really vital area. The major area of interest is visual interface layout [8]. The research in visual interface layout design came into being with the advent of new visual applications as web layout and graphical user interface for computer applications. From so many examples some are UIDE [13], ADDI [14]. Various methods and techniques have been defined to address the problem of automatic web-layout generation. These interface applications typically provide the design process and also support incorporation of domainspecific preferences [3]. These applications provide the half functionality as the course of mapping the domain objects and their properties into corresponding visual properties in the layout design is left for the user. Some applications also tend to use the visual knowledge base to solve this problem [10]. These defined models can assist layout designers in addressing the dynamics of the problem in an efficient manner. The whole related work in this area has been
done in the perspective of facilitating the experts. No work has been done for the novels. A person who is not expert can not use these intimated software applications.
5. User Forms Designing Among various good Web designing practices one is to design websites that are simple and easy for people to interact. There are some key principles for effective design of user-friendly data entry forms. There are very simple things which are usually overlooked during form designing. The designed system has ability to automatically decide that which input components should be used in which situation. Some important considerations are as the radio buttons are only used when options are mutually exclusive and the user has to make only one selection among various options, e.g. Gender. The checkboxes are used when the user has to select as many or as little (including zero) choices according to his requirement [8]. This is common practice during subscribing to various newsletters. A single checkbox is used when the user has a choice of a Boolean value, e.g. on and off and it helps to get the basic concept of good form design. There are more tedious questions to answer that where to use drop–down list instead of radio buttons as both of them perform the similar task [12]. In the current scenario, the radio buttons are used in case of 2 or 3 choices. If choices are more than that drop–down list are used. Some other key rules are also followed when designing a form that typically facilitates a common user during interfacing with a user form. First of all the subheadings are used to separate distinct sections of the target forms. The sectioning of form makes it easier to scan through the choices and make them easier to understand. The lists are designed vertically as this makes it easier for the user to check the multiple choices and make a decision easily [6]. The “other” option is also supported as it helps to provide a new option not listed in the provided list. If the list is endless and user writes word „etc‟ a supplemented textbox is provided as an “other” option. The situation in which user have to select at least one value, always a default value is provided in options for radio buttons and drop–down lists. By definition these inputs require at least one option to be selected.
6. Used Methodology The designed system works in two halves. In first half the user‟s given input text is read by the system and after proper understanding and analysis the necessary information is extracted. This information is further used to draw the sample web layouts. In second half if user also wants to draw the user forms automatically, those
can also be designed by just providing the information about the forms as how many text boxes are required what are their names and other properties.
6.1. Text Understanding This is the major phase of automatically generating the user entry forms. The user writes his requirements and preferences in simple English text. For example a user gives following preferences to draw a sample weblayout. “Draw a text box with label Name, whose maximum length is 25. Draw a text box with label Father Name. Draw a text box with 25 columns and 5 rows, whose label is Address. Draw two option buttons with labels Male and Female. Their name is sex and values are Male and Female. Draw also a submit button. ” Designed system reads such type of input extracts the information after appropriate analysis. Some information is auto generated as name, type and value of a text box, etc. The extracted information is as following Input_1.label= Name Input_1.name= text1 Input_1. type= “Text” Input_1.value= “” Input_1.maxlength= 25 Input_2.label= Father Name Input_2.name= text2 Input_2. type= “Text” Input_2.value= “” Input_3.label= Address Input_3.type = Text Area Input_3.name= text3 Input_3.value= “” Input_3.colums= 25 Input_3.rows= 5 Input_4.label= Gender Input_4.name= sex Input_4.type= radio Input_4.value= “Female” Input_5.name= sex Input_5.type= radio Input_5.value= “Male” Input_6. type= “submit” These defined input types are further processed to generate the concerning HTML code.
6.2. HTML Code Generation After extracting this type of information the designed system has a rigorous ability of generating related HTML code on the base of this information. On the behalf of extracted information nested tables technique is used. For
this particular example following code is generated by the system.
| Name | |
| Father Name | |
| Address | |
| Gender | |
| |
Code -1: Automated HTML generated code This HTML generated code is stored in a new file. The designed system is adequately flexible in analyzing the given text.
6.3. Web Layout Generation After compound analysis and generation of HTML code for user entry form layout is really designed and the actual web page is generated by writing the generate code into new file with .html extension. Many exemplary text requirements were processed by the designed
system. Following is output of one of the examples generated by the designed system. Sample User Forms page
User Forms Generation Creating a new HTML file HTML Code Generation Generating HTML tags to draw forms Information Extraction
Figure 1.0: A sample user entry form automatically generated from user given preferences
Extracting FORM tags information Analyzing User Input
7. Architecture of Designed System Automatic web based user entry forms generation system using natural language processing techniques is adequately capable of understanding the provided input text and generates the required web-layout according to the provided information. The designed system generates the user entry forms in five distinct phases: Reading User Input, Analyzing User Input, Information Extraction, HTML Code generation and finally producing the actual HTML file containing user entry forms. The intended system based on the structural design shown in the following figure 2.0.
7.1 Reading User Input This is the first phase and it helps to acquire input text preference from the user. User provides his requirements in from of paragraphs of the text. This module reads the input text in the form characters and generates the words by concatenating those input characters. This module is the implementation of the lexical phase. Lexicons and tokens are generated in this module.
Text Understanding with syntax Analysis Reading User Input
User given input text in Simple English
Input
Figure 2.0: Structure of Speech Language Engineering Framework for Automatic Generation of User Forms
7.3 Information Extraction This phase particularly extracts different objects as the input boxes, option buttons, check boxes, command buttons etc. Other respective attributes are extracted on the basses of the input provided by the preceding module.
7.2 Analyzing User Input
7.4 HTML Code Generation
This phase reads the input provided by the module 1 in from of words or tokens. These words are categorized into various classes as verbs, helping verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, etc for the various intentions as understanding and further processing of the text.
After extracting the information required to draw the particular HTML tags used to draw the various components of the forms are used as , , ,
