Stressed Syllables

This is an application where you give it some English text, and it will tell you where the stressed syllables are. This is meant to be a convenient tool for non-native speakers to learn this subtle aspect of the English language. It's also helpful for both native and non-native speakers to prepare for presentations, as proper articulation of stressed syllables can make a speech sound more eloquent.

This uses the Phoenix Framework in Elixir to serve requests by getting data from Merriam-Webster, and using a bit of NLP with the Spacy library to improve result quality.

The pre-mnesia branch is currently deployed at stressedsyllables.com

Setup

Assuming you have Elixir, Phoenix, pip and virtualenv installed

mix deps.get
cd assets && npm install && cd -
cd priv/spacy && ./setup.sh && cd -

and run with

# Master
MASTER=true mix phx.server
# Replica
mix phx.server

Type checking

Type checking can be done by running mix dialyzer. There may be some spurious warnings at the moment.

Testing

Tests can be run with mix test <file>

Implementation details

• Data is obtained by scraping Merriam-Webster for stress information for every word in the user's request.
• We need to get the part-of-speech of the word, inferred from the sentence using NLP, to choose the correct definition from the Merriam-Webster (some words in English will have different stresses depending on whether it's a noun or a verb, such as conduct vs conduct).
• There's a separate Python process running to do the NLP, and an Elixir process wraps the Python process.
• The application can run on multiple servers using a master-replica transaction log model. New words are always written to master, which sends a feed of updates to the replicas' caches. If a new replica connects, it'll request the entire state from master.
• The cache is persisted to disk as a transaction log in plain text, and read by master on startup.
• Requests are always received by master, but the word to process words and scrape Merriam-Webster is done by both the master and replicas in a round-robin fashion.

Project status

The application is currently functional for personal use, though not quite ready as actual "product". I worked on this as a side-project to learn Elixir and because I wanted to have it to help fine-tune presentations, but I don't have the motivation to finish it right now. My day-to-day job have been more focused on front-end and graphics, I'll probably get back to this when I do more backend.

Main things to do include:

• Various code quality cleanup/use proper Elixir practices (e.g. name processes, putting GenServer initialization logic in init instead of start_link, etc)
• Finish using Mnesia instead of plaintext for data persistence
• Supervisors and other things to make the application robust against failures
• Consider switching over to Dictionary.com, their data seems better than Merriam-Webster
• Provide time estimates for request completion using WebSockets -- this application can't handle large loads right now since it's limited by how many requests I can send at once to Merriam-Webster without getting rate-limited