Making ETDs More Usable for Students in a Multilingual World

1. 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 Making ETDs More Usable for Students in a Multilingual World 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@vt.edu