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
Bangladesh: A developing country
•
Population: 160+ million,
~3000/sq mi (1)
•
Per-capita GDP doubled since
1975 (1)
http://www.state.gov/cms_images/bangladesh_map.jpg
•
43.1% Literacy (2)
Naushad UzZaman
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh
(2) http://www.nationmaster.com/country/bg-bangladesh/edu-education
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)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Child_labor_Bangladesh.jpg
•
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
(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 Microcredit, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize)
Naushad UzZaman
(1) http://www.brac.net/useruploads/files/BRAC%20Annual%20Report%20-%202008.pdf
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 Text
Burj 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 Allen
Jeffrey Bigham
Natural language
Human Computer Interaction
understanding/processing
Web Accessibility
Co"aborative Human-Machine
Creator: WebAnywhere for Blind
Interaction
people
Naushad UzZaman
Temporal Information
Processing, NLP
Bangla Language
Processing
Naushad UzZaman
April 10, 2010
Questions?
• Thank you!
Naushad UzZaman
April 10, 2010