Making ETDs More Usable for Students in a Multilingual World

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Making ETDs More Usable for Students in a
Multilingual World
Ryan Richardson, Venkat Srinivasan, Xiaoyu Zhang,
Weihua Zhu, Sung Hee Park, Pramodh Pochu, Siva
Sanagavarapu, Muhammad Rafique, Min He, Jiao
Jiao, Edward Fox Digital Libraries Research
Laboratory, Virginia Tech USA
At the Virginia Tech DLRL, we are advancing
research on several fronts to make ETDs more
accessible and usable for students and
researchers, both in English and across languages.
As part of ongoing work to make ETDs available
across languages, we are automatically producing
concept maps from ETDs, and then automatically
translating them into Spanish using phraselists
mined from ETD collections.
We are extending this work from English?Spanish
to English ? Chinese by mining translations of
Chinese words and phrases in technical domains.
We are using text mining techniques to help
identify more relevant ETDs for users from large
ETD collections, thus resulting in increased
precision and recall.
We are also developing software to harvest ETDs
from NDLTD, to extract specific information from
ETDs (Future Work , Problem Statement etc.)
and to recommend papers similar to users
interests.
For more info, contact fox_at_vt.edu