Pictorial Temporal Representation of Documents to Help People who have Trouble

to Read or Understand

Design to Read Workshop at CHI 2010

Naushad UzZaman, Jeffrey P. Bigham and James F. Allen Department of Computer Science

University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Bangladesh: A developing country

• Population: 160+ million, ~3000/sq mi (1)

• Per-capita GDP doubled since 1975 (1)

• 43.1% Literacy (2)(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh

(2) http://www.nationmaster.com/country/bg-bangladesh/edu-education

http://www.state.gov/cms_images/bangladesh_map.jpg

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Reason Behind Low Literacy• 81.3% living under <$2 and 49.6%

living under <$1.25 a day (1)

• Too few quality teachers

• Average salary of senior teacher $3 a day (2)

• 200,000 teachers educate 18.5 million students in 37,672 govt primary schools (2)

• Teacher’s exam: 600K took exam, 66K passed written, 16K passed interview. (2)

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Child_labor_Bangladesh.jpg

(2) http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=83420

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Hope!

• Govt. failed, but private/non-govt sector gave hope

• BRAC, largest NGO in the world

• ~63,000 schools (primary and pre-primary) with 1.88 million students (1)

• other countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan and Srilanka!

• Grameen Bank (initiated by Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus, inventor of Micro-credit, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize)

(1) http://www.brac.net/useruploads/files/BRAC%20Annual%20Report%20-%202008.pdf

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

How can we reach them?

• Just BRAC has 875 libraries with IT, 2002 community libraries, 553 mobile libraries (1)

• IT Infrastructure is already established in many libraries and schools

• Initiate programs to reach students through libraries

• Expand these programs in schools

(1) http://www.brac.net/useruploads/files/BRAC%20Annual%20Report%20-%202008.pdf

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

How can we help?

• Create content for them

• Manual creation is not possible

• Automatic content creation

• Easy to understand

• Easy to create

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Impacts...

• People will know how to survive the flood

• People will know the danger of drinking water from unsafe place

• A farmer will know how to produce better crops

• A student will know the history of Bangladesh

• Students will be less affected by the inaccessibility of skilled teachers

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Sample TextBurj Dubai, whose opening has been delayed twice since construction began in 2004, will mark another milestone for the deeply indebted emirate with a penchant for seeking new records.Dubai, one of seven members of the United Arab Emirates, gained a reputation for excess with the creation of man-made islands shaped like palms and an indoor ski slope in the desert.With investor confidence in Dubai badly bruised by the emirate's announcement in November that it would seek a debt standstill for one of its largest conglomerates, the Burj Dubai is seen as a positive start to the year after a bleak 2009.

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Pictorial Temporal Representation

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Challenges

• Build temporal structure of document

• Extract events and temporal expressions

• Identify temporal relations between events or event and temporal expression

• Generate a temporal structure and represent them in easy to follow manner

• Generate images for events and associated entities

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Who else will be benefitted?

• People with Learning disabilities

• People whose first language is not English

• Children

• Older people

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Our Expertise

James AllenNatural language

understanding/processingCo"aborative Human-Machine

Interaction

Jeffrey BighamHuman Computer Interaction

Web AccessibilityCreator: WebAnywhere for Blind

peopleNaushad UzZaman

Temporal Information Processing, NLP

Bangla Language Processing

Naushad UzZaman April 10, 2010

Questions?

•Thank you!