New tool makes reading online articles Simpler for students

As a secondary school teacher, Mr Noah Zhang found it could be difficult to find suitable online articles that could serve as reading material for students, as many were pitched at adults.

- Zhaki Abdullah

Some students—especially those who required more literacy support—would often have to turn to their teachers to help simplify the articles for them, he said.

Mr Zhang raised this problem in January during a hackathon organised by Open Government Products, an independent division of the Government Technology Agency (GovTech).

GovTech deputy chief executive Chang Sau Sheong told The Straits Times that he was intrigued by the problem posed by Mr Zhang, who is now serving a stint in the Ministry of Education's (MOE) Information Technology Division as a consultant.

"I reached out to Noah, and then we started a conversation on the problem, which is, how do you help students be able to read and understand better the things that they read?" said Mr Chang.

It was this concern that led to the development of Simpler, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to encourage students to read more by simplifying difficult words and sentences online.

The Chrome browser extension rephrases sentences and breaks them down into shorter fragments to allow for easier reading.

By just highlighting words on a webpage, Simpler is able to display different versions of words and sentences aligned with students' preferred reading levels, enabling them to more easily understand online content.

For example, Simpler could simplify the following sentence—from an article on the National Library Board's website—in a number of ways.

"The spice trade brought Arab traders to South-east Asia, which led to the spread of Arabic cuisine to Indonesia, and eventually to Malaya."