ITRM990252A1 - TECHNIQUE OF AUTOMATIC ACCESS TO THE LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS INFORMATION BY USING THE MOBILE KEYBOARD. - Google Patents

Description

Description of the invention entitled:

"TECHNIQUE OF AUTOMATIC ACCESS TO THE LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS BY USING THE KEYBOARD OF MOBILE PHONES"

The invention refers in general to the techniques of automatic retrieval of information in computer-type archives and more particularly it deals with an automatic access method to the service 12 (subscriber information list) through the use of the mobile phone keyboard.

State of the art

The keyboards of ETACS and GSM mobile phones currently use twelve keys for entering numerical and alphabetic information: keys 2-9 for dialing numbers and letters and keys 0.1, * and # for special functions. For the typing of alphabetic words, the mechanism used is to divide the entire alphabet by associating a single number to a sequence of 3/4 letters as in the diagram below:

Numbers Letters

The typing of a letter of the alphabet is obtained by typing the corresponding key many times according to its position. For example, if you want to type the letter "C" you need to type key 2 three times. This method, widely used on mobile phones for programming personalized diary or for sending short messages, is somewhat archaic and is not suitable for the creation of new services to be provided to users.

On the other hand, in addition to the laboriousness of having to type the same key for each letter several times, the exact number of times necessary, the cellular keyboards due to their small size can induce the user to make the typing error of a character instead of another.

Aims of the invention

The object of the present invention is to provide a mobile phone user with the possibility of accessing generalized databases by typing and sending alphabetic words obtained by pressing a single button on the mobile phone for each corresponding letter.

A further object of the present invention is to obtain automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of mobile phones which uses standard hardware resources, protocols and procedures in the field of telephony in order to make the access method cost-effective. and easy to use for the user.

The retrieval method according to the present invention allows to obtain excellent results starting only from the fields relating to the surname, name or address and locality. Therefore the user can be facilitated in the search by omitting for example the name or address of the subscriber.

The system is characterized by a remarkable robustness even when one or more fields have a typing error due to the mistaken substitution of one character with another or due to the addition or omission of a character with respect to the alphabetic field that you really wanted to type.

These aims and advantages and others besides which will be clear in the course of the description are obtained by means of a technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by means of the use of the mobile phone keypad which uses means dedicated to an interactive conversation for opening and the use of the service and which includes the following operational phases:

I- enable the user who wants to search for a telephone number, to type on the keyboard, for each letter of each string that constitutes a field of the starting information from which to retrieve the telephone number of the subscriber, a single numeric key specific correspondent and to type a particular final control key as a terminator;

II- implement the acquisition through said means dedicated to the interactive interview, of a series of fields relating to the surname, name, location and address of the subscriber whose telephone number is to be obtained - each of these fields and 'acquired in numerical form and delimited by said terminator character-;

III- send, through said dedicated means, to a database server the individual fields entered by the telephone user in the form of numeric fields and said database server carries out the required retrieval operations as it is able to manage archives containing for each key and the related attributes, from the extensional point of view, only numeric strings - these archives are obtained from a one-to-one correspondence at the attribute and key level with the content of a database of subscribers constituted from the extensional point of view on the basis of type strings alphanumeric-;

IV- compare each numeric string sent relating to a retrieval request with each numeric string constituting the list of unique fields surname, name and address relating to the selected location by extrapolating for each string sent a list of numerical strings with the related logical locations of the n best numeric keys coinciding exactly or partially with said string sent and ordering each of said lists of the n best numeric keys as a function of the probability of success;

V- combine the lists of the n best numeric keys, relative to the various fields constituting the starting information, and order them according to the total probability, the total numeric key list thus generated, to which a similar list logically corresponds in alphabetical form relating to the subscriber database itself, it is used to access the subscribers database and in order to propose to the user for definitive confirmation only the combinations actually present in the database itself.

For illustrative purposes only and without thereby limiting the generality and possible fields of application, some preferred embodiments of the invention are described below. Figure 1 attached is a basic diagram of the telephone system architecture relating to one of these embodiments that allows the use of the access technique according to the present invention. The other embodiments described do not differ substantially from the diagram shown in Figure 1.

Description of some favorite creations

In the service for requesting telephone numbers from a subscriber list according to the present invention, the user through his mobile phone connected to his telephone network is invited by means of pre-recorded messages, to type on the keyboard the information relating to the surname, name and address of the subscriber of which he wants to obtain the telephone number. Each single field is obtained by pressing a single numeric key per letter of the alphabet followed by a terminator such as a character of The information obtained by typing the various keys in sequence is automatically sent from the mobile phone to a database server which will implement ' the actual retrieval operation. As is evident, any word typed in this way may not be uniquely identified. For example, if you want to type the word "KISS" using the mobile phone keypad, you would have to type the sequence of numbers "22246". It is evident that other words can correspond to this numerical sequence, such as "CACIO" being the letter "C" encoded with the same numerical key. This implies that the search for such words in a database is non-deterministic.

As will be better clarified below, the system developed according to the present invention, on the other hand, is able to extract, by accessing a database server, the telephone number requested based on specific uncertainty management techniques. In this first part, the description provides for the preliminary presentation of two possible variations on the basic system architecture according to the modalities of interaction by the user with the subscriber information list service. Such interactions can be:

1) of vocal type, or

2) via Menu.

The voice-type interaction mode has been designed for all users who have both ETACS analog and GSM digital cell phones, while the interaction mode, guided through the Menu, has been designed for that category of mobile phone users who have telephones of the new generation GSM Phase 2 and Plus.

In the system with voice interaction - which is the one to which the system architecture shown in Figure 1- refers more specifically, the automatic access technique to the subscriber information list service is basically based on a CTI (Computer Telephony Integration ) consisting of a telephone front-end 12 and a server 14 for accessing the subscriber database 15. The telephone front-end 12 is responsible for the interaction between the user and the system and guides the user, connected to the telephone network 11, by means of pre-recorded messages, to correctly perform all the operations for typing information through the keypad of the mobile phone 10. The database server 14, on the other hand, has the task of searching, on the basis of the information provided by the user, for the telephone number more likely than the desired subscriber.

The telephone front-end 12 which constitutes the man / machine interface has been designed with ergonomic criteria in order to facilitate the user during the various phases of the interaction. It sequentially transmits the:

A) welcome message,

B) messages for the acquisition of information, C) data confirmation messages,

D) closing messages.

The welcome message is intended to present the type of service offered to the user as well as all the information relating to the methods of interaction. For example, the user is asked to type on the keyboard for each letter a single corresponding numeric key and to type the key as the terminator of each word.

The information acquisition messages are messages that invite the user to type on the keyboard the fields relating to the surname, name, locality, address of the subscriber whose telephone number is to be obtained. The user can choose to provide the system with the surname or locality only the first name or only the address when one of this information is not known a priori.

The next phase of the man / machine interview consists in providing the user in the text-tospeech form with the results resulting from the processing of the data received in the previous phase. After making his choice, the user types on the keyboard the number corresponding to the alternative proposed by the system. In the event that the system is unable to provide the correct answer, or the telephone database contains a large number of alternatives with the same surname and name, then the system interconnects the user with an operator 16. In this case the operator 16, together with the notification of the arrival of a new telephone call via the analogue line 17, receives on its terminal, via the LAN-type data network 18, the list of names selected by the user, facilitating it during the final selection phase of the chosen subscriber. At the conclusion of the interaction, the system sends the user the telephone number of the subscriber requested via text-to-speech, billing the service offered at the same time to the user. The database server 14 is the heart of the entire system as it is responsible for processing the information entered by the user of the mobile phone 10 and received by the telephone front-end 12 in the form of DTMF tones. Every single field typed by the user is sent from the telephone front-end to the database server 14 in the form of a numeric field. The numeric string, if there are no typing errors, will be of exactly the same length as the alphabetic one since each letter of the alphabet will correspond to one and only one numeric code. Similarly to a numeric string, more alphabetic strings can correspond instead.

Let us now examine the case in which a user has typed the last name of the subscriber whose telephone number he is looking for on the mobile phone keypad.

The numeric string received from the database server will be compared with each numeric string making up the list of unique surnames relating to the chosen city.

The matching phase will have the task of extrapolating a list (n-best) of localizations, on the dbase server, of numeric strings that exactly or partially coincide with the starting string. Each of them will be assigned a probability of success whose maximum value will be for the coincident strings and lower probability for the increasingly discordant strings. The numeric n-best list thus created will correspond to a similar list of surnames in alphabetical form.

Similarly for the surname, also the fields relating to the name, locality and address will each be compared respectively with the list of names, localities and unique addresses extracted from the subscriber database. From their processing, the best lists of logical localizations on the database server of each single field will be extracted, ordered according to the probability of success of the individual components.

The n-best lists relating to the localization of the surname, name, locality and address will be combined with each other and ordered according to the total probability. The overall list generated will be used to access the subscriber database. Only those combinations present in the database will be proposed to the user for a definitive confirmation.

It is evident how the implemented technique is based on the specific interrelation between the database server 14 and the database 15 of the information list service so that the alignment of the data is constantly guaranteed. This allows to operate on a field or a numeric key of the database server 14, logically maintaining a correspondence with one and only one field or alphanumeric key of the subscriber database 15.

An important aspect that has been kept in mind is the existence on the market of ETACS and GSM mobile phones which have a different association between the numeric code of the keypad and the alphabetic character set.

From an analysis carried out on the various types of keyboards on the market, it was found that they can be assimilated to five different types as shown in the attached prospectus. The differences compared to the new generation of GSM phones that have a standard keyboard configuration are essentially due to the different positioning of the letters "Q", "Z" and "0" or in the case of Telital phones due to the different use of the "1" key "used to encode the letters of the alphabet" A, B, C ".

To discriminate the type of keyboard, the system, before the acquisition phase of the single fields, asks the user to type the letters "Q" and "0". Depending on the numeric code received, the system is able to identify the type of keyboard used and therefore to correctly associate the letters of the alphabet with the numeric keys.

In the second type of system architecture considered which allows interaction via the Menu, reference is made to GSM mobile phones equipped with SIM phase 2+ cards. With this type of cell phone, man / machine interaction is carried out directly on the user's cell phone through the use of a menu managed by the application loaded directly on the SIM card.

The steps implemented on the mobile phone are as follows:

1. Data entry

2. Send the data to the server

3. Query the database

4. Sending reply

5. Processing and display of the answer by the mobile phone

6. Making a call to the number searched for 1. Entering the data

By navigating in the application's submenus, requests to enter the surname, name, location and address of the subscriber whose telephone number you want to know appear on the mobile phone display from time to time. The user, using the technique described above, that is to type for each letter one and only one key corresponding to it, completes the data entry phase.

2. Send the data to the server

The application on the SIM will format the information received and send it via SMS (short message) to a server set up for the purpose. For example, the data "Rossi Mario Roma" corresponds to a message of the type "76774 = 62746 = 7662".

3. Query the database

Once the SMS has reached the server, all the necessary processing is performed on it to resolve cases of ambiguity and extract the telephone number of the desired subscriber from the database, similarly to the first type of implementation already described.

4. Sending reply

Once the data has been processed, it is the server's task to send the search results to the mobile phone in the form of a suitably compressed SMS in order to contain in a single message as many alternatives as possible to be submitted to the user.

5. Processing and display of the answer by the mobile phone

The information received from the mobile phone is in turn presented to the user in order of priority with the relevant telephone number requested.

6. Making a call to the number searched The application on the SIM card allows, once confirmed, the name and the desired telephone number to directly select the number by confirming the sending using the confirmation key. This method allows you to automate the call phase of the desired subscriber by simply pressing a button.

End benefits

The validity of the procedure implemented and the certainty of the achievable result is supported by the probabilistic analysis which refers to uncertainty management techniques with particular evaluation criteria of the negative probability.

In particular if we assume that n1, n2, n3, n4 and n5 are the number of unique city names, surnames, proper names, street names and house numbers, respectively and assume that w1, w2, w3, w4, w5 are the number of unique city names, surnames, proper names, street names, respectively, found in the best-n list, the total number of possible records (complete addresses) is:

N = n1 * n2 * n3 * n4 * n5

And the total number of records that can be produced from all the combinations available in the n-best list is:

W = w1 * w2 * w3 * w4 * w5

so if you have a database containing D unique records, defined:

P = the probability that no element of D is in W, if the database contains only one record the probability that that record is not in the set W is: Total number of records not in W N-W

Total number of records N

If the database contains two records, the probability that neither of them is in the set W is: the probability that the first record is not in W, multiplied by the probability that the second record is not in W, that is:

It should be noted that, in the second term of the expression, the total number of records that can be equal to the second database record is reduced by one; the reason is that, after checking for the first record in the database, we know that that first record should be ignored in the next lookup (since the database records are unique).

Therefore, in the general case in which there are D records in the database, the value of P is calculated as follows:

Where D + W <= N

In a basic case we considered a database consisting of a thousand records with lists of 30 cities, 50 proper names, 150 surnames, 120 street names and 10 house numbers, provided that the number of unique records contained in the n-best list is 10 in all cases, except for the house number, for which it is assumed to be 1, the probability that no database element contains, in each of its five fields, an element present in the respective n-best list wn is 0.9636 .

More simply, this means that it is extremely unlikely that a randomly generated record in the circumstances described will match a record actually present in the database.

This probability is in fact equal to:

probability of a random match = 1-09636 = 0.0364.

Now the decoding system is such that in the n-best list there are only very few other words besides the searched word. The probability that the original word is in the list can be assumed to be equal to 1. On the other hand, given the length of the lists w, it is clear that many other combinations will be recognized (W). It is therefore necessary to ensure that these combinations, in the vast majority of cases, are not found in the original database by chance. The probability P ensures these pressures.

In summary, we have that a number Nc of candidates are chosen by the system for the next phase of cross-search in the database and even by considerably enlarging the scale of the systems, a value of the same order remains. At this point the sets of candidates (city and surnames) each with a maximum size of Nc, are used to "generate" all possible combinations, from which only those present in the database are selected. The system can also be expected to request particular information (the proper name or address), depending on what is deemed most useful.

Global candidates (i.e. those present in the database) inherit the combined probabilities in the constituent fields. It should be noted that the absence of a field does not invalidate the search for the global candidate, but only determines the probabilistic penalty.

For each information that the user introduces, the set of possible records is restricted, eventually reaching a small number of global candidates.

These candidates are proposed to the user for confirmation by providing him with the necessary data to eliminate any final ambiguity.

However, it is not certain that the system can always reach a restricted range of candidates, in which case the call is transferred to a possible operator. The operator will automatically receive on his terminal the complete list of names to be submitted to the user. Once the choice has been confirmed, the desired telephone number will be communicated to the user via text-to-speech.

Industrial applicability of the invention

Among the most immediate advantages for the operator is that of the almost complete automation of the subscriber information list service; however, as already described, to solve the more complex cases, i.e. when a request made with only the surname and name of a subscriber correspond to a large number of users, the operator gets the list directly on their terminal of the names chosen by the user. In this case, the operator will only support the user in the final phase of searching for the required number, reducing the interaction time with the user to just a few seconds.

Another service that the operator can provide to the user is that of "cali completion": once the caller has confirmed the user's number, the system is able to make the phone call directly, putting the caller and the called party in communication.

There are numerous and significant advantages of the service described for the user who owns the mobile phone:

lower cost of the service,

automatic forwarding of calls when using GSM phase 2 plus,

- ease of interaction,

- simplified access to new services,

- 24/24 service availability.

Furthermore, it is evident that the man / machine interactions described above for the residential subscriber information list service are also suitable for managing business users. In this case, the system will present the user with a type of message optimized for this type of application.

More generally, the retrieval technique described above can be used effectively for the automation of other services such as the management of the retrieval of information on means of transport, or on cultural heritage, etc.

Claims (11)

CLAIMS 1) Technique of automatic access to the subscriber information list through the use of the mobile phone keypad that uses dedicated means (12) to an interactive interview for the opening and use of the service, characterized by the fact of I- enable the user who wants to search for a telephone number, to type on the keyboard, for each letter of each string that constitutes a field of the starting information from which to retrieve the telephone number of the subscriber, a single numeric key specific correspondent and to type a particular final control key as a terminator; II- implement the acquisition through said means dedicated (12) to the interactive interview, of a series of fields relating to the surname, name, location and address of the subscriber whose telephone number is to be obtained, as each of these fields acquired in numerical form and delimited by said terminator character; III- send, through said dedicated means (12), to a database server (14) the individual fields entered by the telephone user in the form of numerical fields by implementing said database server (14) the required retrieval operations, and being able to manage archives containing for each key and the related attributes, from the extensional point of view, only numerical strings and these archives being obtained from a one-to-one correspondence at the attribute and key level with the content of a subscriber database (15) constituted from the extensional point of view on the basis of alphanumeric type strings; IV- compare each numeric string sent relating to a retrieval request with each numeric string constituting the list of unique fields surname, name and address relating to the selected location by extrapolating for each string sent a list of numerical strings with the relative logical locations of the n best numeric keys coinciding exactly or partially with said string sent and ordering each of said lists of the n best numeric keys as a function of the probability of success; V- combine the lists of the n best numerical keys relative to the various fields constituting the starting information and order them according to the total probability, using the list of overall numerical keys thus generated, which logically corresponds to an analogous list in alphabetical form relating to the subscriber database (15) itself, for access to the subscribers database (15) and to propose to the user for definitive confirmation only the combinations actually present in the database itself. 2. Technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the mobile phone keypad according to claim 1, characterized in that in order to generate the aforementioned lists of the n best keys following the acquisition of the numeric type requests, the database server (14 ) extract from a system of archives provided, each composed of D unique keys, a series of possible alternatives and such alternatives of candidate keys are ordered for each required field based on the application of an uncertainty management algorithm in the search that evaluates the probability that no database key is in the list of length W of the best based on the product being N the total number of keys that each database (14,15) can contain and being D + W <= N. 3. Technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of the telephone mobile phone according to claim 1, characterized by the fact that said means dedicated to the interactive conversation for the use of the service consist of a front-end (12) telephone able to manage the interaction between the user and the telephone network system by guiding the user through pre-recorded voice messages to perform the operations of typing information through the mobile phone keypad (10). 4. Technique of automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of the telephone mobile phone according to claim 1 characterized by the fact that said means dedicated to the interactive conversation for the opening and use of the service consist of specific applications and procedures loaded on the SIM card with which the mobile phone is equipped by appearing on the display from time to time, to the user interacting with the application's submenus, the request to enter the information from which to obtain the desired telephone number. 5. Technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of the mobile phone according to claims 1 and 3, characterized in that in order to discriminate the type of keypad, the access procedures before the step of acquiring the individual fields , ask the user to type in two specific letters and, depending on the numeric code received, the access procedures are able to identify the type of keyboard used and therefore to correctly associate the letters of the alphabet with the number keys. 6. Technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of the mobile phone according to claims 1,3 and 5 characterized in that in order to discriminate the type of keypad, the access procedures, before the acquisition step of the individual fields, ask the user to type the letters "Q" and "0". 7. Technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of the mobile phone according to claim 1, characterized in that the series of fields acquired for retrieval consists of the surname, name and locality of the subscriber . 8. Technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of the mobile phone according to claim 1, characterized in that the series of fields acquired for retrieval consists of the surname, locality and address of the subscriber . 9. Technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of the mobile phone according to claims 1 and 4, characterized by the fact of sending the acquired information in the form of SMS to the database server (14) by means of an application resident on the SIM. 10. Technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of the telephone mobile phone according to claims 1 and 4, characterized in that once the search is completed, the results are sent from the database server to the telephone in the form of SMS by compressing in the message the maximum number of alternatives to submit to the user. 11. Technique for automatic access to the subscriber information list by using the keypad of the telephone mobile phone according to claims 1, 3 and 4, characterized by the fact of automating the call step of the desired subscriber by simply pressing the confirmation key a once the telephone number has been received, shown on the display.