SINGAPORE – 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.
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 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 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.”
For those with more reading difficulties, the sentence could read: “Traders from Arabia came to South-east Asia. They traded spices. They also brought their food. This food spread to Indonesia. Later, it spread to Malaya.”
For others with higher reading fluency, the sentence could be simplified as: “Arab traders came to South-east Asia because of the spice trade. They brought Arabic cuisine with them. This cuisine spread to Indonesia. Later, it also reached Malaya.”
Mr Chang said he came up with the basic framework of what would become Simpler in one night, later developing it further based on discussions with Mr Zhang.
Now, a team from MOE’s Information Technology Division is working to enhance the tool.
Using GPT-4o as its large language model, Simpler was prominently featured as a project under Singapore’s refreshed Smart Nation 2.0 strategy, announced on Oct 1 by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong.
The plan aims to equip people here with skills to thrive in the digital economy, foster a community spirit through digital inclusion, and build online safety and trust.