String analysis and classification

Question

I am developing a financial manager in my freetime with Java and Swing GUI. When the user adds a new entry, he is prompted to fill in: Moneyamount, Date, Comment and Section (e.g. Car, Salary, Computer, Food,...)

The sections are created "on the fly". When the user enters a new section, it will be added to the section-jcombobox for further selection. The other point is, that the comments could be in different languages. So the list of hard coded words and synonyms would be enormous.

So, my question is, is it possible to analyse the comment (e.g. "Fuel", "Car service", "Lunch at **") and preselect a fitting Section. My first thought was, do it with a neural network and learn from the input, if the user selects another section.

But my problem is, I don´t know how to start at all. I tried "encog" with Eclipse and did some tutorials (XOR,...). But all of them are only using doubles as in/output.

Anyone could give me a hint how to start or any other possible solution for this?

Here is a runable JAR (current development state, requires Java7) and the Sourceforge Page

Answer 1

Forget about neural networks. This is a highly technical and specialized field of artificial intelligence, which is probably not suitable for your problem, and requires a solid expertise. Besides, there is a lot of simpler and better solutions for your problem.

First obvious solution, build a list of words and synonyms for all your sections and parse for these synonyms. You can then collect comments online for synonyms analysis, or use parse comments/sections provided by your users to statistically detect relations between words, etc...

There is an infinite number of possible solutions, ranging from the simplest to the most overkill. Now you need to define if this feature of your system is critical (prefilling? probably not, then)... and what any development effort will bring you. One hour of work could bring you a 80% satisfying feature, while aiming for 90% would cost one week of work. Is it really worth it?

Go for the simplest solution and tackle the real challenge of any dev project: delivering. Once your app is delivered, then you can always go back and improve as needed.