ProCollab Search Engine Backend

The ProCollab Search Engine Backend powers the search functionality for ProCollab, a project collaboration platform. This backend processes user queries and project data, delivering ranked results using natural language processing (NLP) techniques.

---

Features

1. Flask-Based Backend:

   • Built using Flask, a lightweight Python framework, to handle server-side logic.

2. Cross-Origin Requests:

   • Uses Flask-CORS to enable seamless communication between the frontend and backend.

3. Data Processing with NLTK:

   • Leverages the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) for tokenization, stopword removal, and lemmatization.

4. API Integration:

   • Fetches project data from an external API and stores it in a global variable (global_var).

5. TF-IDF Vectorization:

   • Transforms text into numerical representations for similarity calculations.

6. Query Expansion:

   • Enhances user search queries by adding synonyms to improve search results.

7. Cosine Similarity:

   • Calculates the similarity between user queries and project data to rank results.

8. Result Ranking:

   • Returns projects ranked by their similarity scores for the best user experience.

---

How It Works

1. Fetching and Preparing Data:

• Project data is fetched from an external API using the get_data_from_api() function.
• Both user queries and project data undergo text preprocessing:
  • Tokenization
  • Stopword removal
  • Lemmatization

2. Processing User Queries:

• User queries are expanded with synonyms to improve search coverage.
• Preprocessed queries are transformed into TF-IDF vectors.

3. Calculating Similarity:

• Cosine similarity scores are computed between the user's query and each project's data.
• Higher scores indicate better matches.

4. Returning Results:

• Projects are ranked by similarity scores.
• The backend responds to the frontend with project IDs and similarity scores.

---

Technology Stack

• Programming Language: Python
• Framework: Flask
• NLP Library: NLTK
• Vectorization: TF-IDF
• API Integration: External API for project data
• Cross-Origin Requests: Flask-CORS

---

Installation and Setup

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/your-username/procollab-backend.git
   cd procollab-backend

Installation and Setup

2. Install dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   python app.py