MyOracle: A Question-Answering application to improve access to information for low-literacy users

Ibrahim Didi and Anandha Gopalan



Abstract:

To bridge the information gap in low-income countries, a critical issue is of being able to provide easily accessible information to low-literacy users. In particular, facilitating access to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) related information is crucial to bolster curiosity and accompany the democratization of engineering education. In order to tackle this challenge, we introduce MyOracle, a question-answering application focusing on STEM related questions and which is tailored to low-literacy users. MyOracle achieves this using three steps: extracting answers from the web, curating these answers and then summarizing and translating the resulting text. Finally we study and compare the disparities in content availability between nine languages with varying number of speakers and discuss the trade-offs between a translation-based approach and a native approach for lower-resource languages.