easyRights tackles two major challenges to successful immigrant integration.
* Physical – simplifying the complexities of international, national and local norms that differentiate its mechanisms across the countries;
* Social – it aims to change the diffuse, albeit wrong, feeling that immigrants have about themselves as ‘illegal citizens’ that acts as impediment to the full exercise of their acknowledged and endorsed rights.

The project achieves this aim through 5 main objectives:

1. IMPROVE LANGUAGE SKILLS

Improving language skills will be done by expanding the web based CALST platform, which was originally developed at NTNU, which is focused on tailored pronunciation training (listening, speaking and writing). In combination with CALST, the NTNU spin­off company Capeesh also a member in the consortium, has added a specific focus and features on personalized vocabulary learning.

2. ENHANCE COMMUNICATION

Enhancing the effectiveness of communication and thus, the immigrants’ understanding of their fundamental rights, irrespective of legal status, will be supported on the easyRights platform by a multilingual Natural Language Understanding (NLU) system. This module aims to overcome the communication problems proffered by most complex government ­led welcome portals through the implementation of state of the art AI and machine reading capabilities.

3. MAKE INFO ACCESSIBLE TO ALL

Integration of Amazon’s Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), enables the creation of personalized service experiences via the exploitation of voice recognition and Natural Language Processing tools.

4. ENSURE A SHARED UNDERSTANDING

To pave the way for co-creation on the platform (e.g. through hackathons), easyRights will deliver both a Mediation Grammar ­module, and a semantic model representing the classes of migrants with context data ­and a Recommender System which is a personalization and contextualization service based on collaborative, content ­based filtering and user’s path dependency. The combination of these tools will create a fertile knowledge base for co-creation to deliver cross-border applications and tools.

5. CONNECT SYSTEMS

Both the Mediation Grammar and the Recommender System is “fed” by a preliminary activity of mapping, disintegration and reconstruction of the key administrative rules and procedures that facilitate immigrants’ access to welfare services and enable them to exercise their civil rights, while adopting the point of view (and the language) of prospective beneficiaries. This activity is facilitated by the NLU system deployed and tested in the four pilots, which will be the early users of the system itself.