Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning/Profiles/Educational Facilita

Concept Description

We are developing an online reading assistance through the presentation of synonymous or definitions for the words which we classify as difficult to be understood by the user, the Educational Facilita. The assistance would also provide additional information about proper nouns that are inserted in the text.

It is expected that these additional informations presented in the text through the proposed approach would help users in their reading activities of websites and allow the users to learn the meaning of new or unusual words/expressions. It is important to emphasize that even the W3C through its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG) in the Successes Criteria 3.1.3 and 3.1.4 acknowledge the importance of providing mechanisms to help users to understand possibly unusual words and abbreviations, in the web accessibility context.

The assistance is to be made available to users through the following interactions in the mockup:

1. Activate the Jetpack Activation link.
2. Then every word which is possibly difficult to be understood and proper nouns identified in the text are highlighted.
3. When the user passes the mouse through the highlighted words or expressions then it is presented the user with synonymous or additional informations.

In order to present this assistance to users, the Educational Facilita will make use of the following concepts and technologies: Lexical Elaboration and proper nouns Recognition.

The lexical elaboration process aims to provide the reader additional information about the words in the text with definitions, synonyms and explanations of the terms. Words considered hard to ready are in general the target of lexical elaboration. In Facilita Educacional is proposed the use of synonyms for difficult words (known by little number of language speakers). The synonyms were taken from the thesaurus TeP. Synonyms are presented only for words that are not in a easy words list presented in the study of Caseli et al. (2008). A study on the presentation of synonymous words in simplicity order is already in progress. It is also developing the synonyms inflection related to the difficult words in the text. The inflection allows synonymous of nouns appear in plural also appear in the plural, and synonyms of verbs keep the tense of the original word, among other operations.

Team members

1. Arnaldo Candido Junior
2. Marcelo Adriano Amâncio
3. Matheus de Oliveira
4. Willian Massami Watanabe.

Mockups and Prototypes

1. mockup

ToDo list

1. Studying jetpack development platform