Phillipian Mobile App

Welcome to The Phillipian vol. CXLVII's Mobile App

developed and maintained by Tianyi Gu, Managing Editor, CXLVII

(to be released on iOS and Android web store) Access The Phillipian's online website here!

Running Locally

Get Started

Install dev dependencies:

npm install

For iOS Development

1. Install Cocoapods if you haven't already:

   sudo gem install cocoapods

2. Generate native iOS project files:

   npx expo prebuild

3. Open the iOS project in Xcode:

   open ios/*.xcworkspace

Run The App

npm start

Runs your app in development mode.

Install the Expo app on your phone and scan the generated QR code.

npm run ios/npm run android

Opens app on iOS or Android Simulator (installation needed)

Features

Article Summarization

The app now includes an AI-powered article summarization feature:

• Click the "Generate Summary" button at the bottom of any article
• View a concise summary in a modal panel
• Close the summary with the X button to return to the article

Backend Setup

The summarization feature requires a Flask backend server:

1. Install Python dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Run the Flask server:

   python server/app.py

The server runs on port 5001 and provides the /api/summarize endpoint for article summarization.

Configuration

• Update src/config/api.ts with your local server IP address
• Default port is 5001
• Make sure your device and server are on the same network

Development Notes

• The app uses React Native with Expo
• Backend uses FastAPI
• Article summaries are generated in real-time
• Dark mode support throughout the app

tradeoffs between models size/ speed/ accuracy: Summary model:

• Facebook/bart-large-cnn,

Question answering model:

• Production: deepset/deberta-v3-base-squad2
• Using Haystack framework with:
  • BM25Retriever for document retrieval
  • TransformersReader for answer extraction
• Optimized with custom BM25 parameters (b=0.75, k1=1.2)

Translation models:

• Using Marian Neural Machine Translation (Helsinki-NLP)