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.