SmartNotepad

Inspiration

We realized that most of us write notes but don't really learn much from them. So we thought it would be great if students could have access to an application that could help them take notes as well as help them study at the same time.

What it does

This NodeApp iterates through the students notes and provides a questions after processing the sentence, it provides a question along with it's answer.

How we built it

We used the Google Natural Language Processing to get syntactical data and and entity data for the sentences. From the entities we figured out the question word and used the dependency tree to figure out the answer and the question phrase. We used the semantic connections between the tokens (JSON objects contains syntactical information about each word). We used the API for NodeJS to parse this data and create the questions as a string.

Challenges we ran into

We thought the Google NLP API provided enough information to intuitively for questions but we realized that there are still some limitations. One of the biggest things we noticed was that Google's API couldn't resolve dates. We were actually trying to implement the web application but we couldn't get angularjs to work with nodejs in time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully connected to the Google Cloud Platform and running the Natural Language Processing API and used language semantics to generate questions.

What we learned

We learned that NLP is a lot more advanced that we thought but that it also has a long way to go in terms of grammar. Google has done a good job with their dependency tree to identify phrases that go together but it lacks the analyzing complex sentence structures with conjectures etc.

What's next for SmartNotepad

The SmartNotepad is currently a nodejs application so it can easily implemented onto a website as a web application where students can copy their questions and receive questions with answers. In collaboration with existing notetaking applications, we could offer real time questions with answers to help students quiz themself and better their education process.