Promo-Zen: A Natural Language Processing Based Promotional Text Message Management System
Chamath Udugampola, Nethmi Weerasingha · 2024
Promotional Short Message Service (SMS) messages, which provide frequent updates about deals and discounts to consumers, are crucial in developing countries like Sri Lanka, as they help alleviate financial pressure during economic crises. However, poor practices by the brands, SMS technology limitations and human memory limitations challenge the ability of consumers to make effective use of this facility. As a solution, this project aimed to develop an Android application to organize and enhance the readability of promotional messages, while also providing mechanisms to prevent users from forgetting promotions. These objectives were achieved by creating a Kotlin app that displays promotional information in a date-sorted weekly dashboard, offers deal-expiration reminders, and optimizes message content for readability. The system utilizes a novel workflow/pipeline combining a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model with Named Entity Recognition (NER) capabilities, Regular Expressions and custom logic, to understand the context of and extract the crucial information from the promotional messages. User-acceptance testing carried out demonstrates positive results, reducing traditional access times to promotions of 8–10 seconds to approximately 2 seconds through this application. Additionally, user-testers reported multiple occurrences of the reminders feature ensuring that promotions weren't forgotten before use.