ba-online-form

This is the code base for the online form I used for my bachelor thesis to collect human written summarizations and simplifications which afterwerds where compared against AI generated summarizations/simplifications.

The app was written in python flask, uses some basic html and css and was deployed via vercel.

You can visit the online form here.

Motivation

I was looking for a way to collect human written summaries. It needed to have a low threshold for participation and also be easy to distribute. A link to an online form with the texts to be summarized and a submission field for the summarization seemed ideal. However, none of the modular online form builders I have tried seemed to provide a way (at least not obvious to me) to realise a feature I realy wanted: Increasing the chance of a text to be displayed if it was less often summarized than the other texts, meaning a logic to negatively weigh the texts with respect to the number of summaries they each received.

So I wrote my own web-app for that.

Requirements

Dependencies

The form / web app depends on

• flask
• vercel
• numpy
• psycopg2-binary

Also a vercel account (free) and a postgres database was used, because the vercel runtime environment is readonly and for my idea to work read/write access was necessary.

Vercel also provides a way to store environment variables like e-mail adresses, passworts, database access, etc. in an encrypted form. These information are necessary for the online forms workflow (using the database, transmitting submissions via e-mail, etc.).

Export variables

Also an export_vars.sh bash script is expected if one wants to examine the form locally prior deploying via vercel. It needs to be run once per bash session prior to viewing the form. If you don't need that, you can skip this part.

The export_vars.sh can be beuilt from this draft:

export SMTP_SERVER= ...
export SMTP_PORT= ...
export SMTP_USERNAME= ...
export SMTP_PASSWORD= ...
export EMAIL_FROM= ...
export EMAIL_TO= ...
export APP_SECRET_KEY= ... 

export POSTGRES_URL= "postgres:// ..." # The URL to your postgres database
export POSTGRES_PORT= ...
export POSTGRES_HOST= ...

The SMTP and EMAIL statements are used to have simple way to receive submissions, i.e. just sending the summarized text from me (EMAIL_FROM) to me (EMAIL_TO) upon clicking the submit button in the form.