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Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain valuable scholarly information that can be of immense value to the scholarly community. Millions of ETDs are now publicly available online, often through one of many digital libraries. However, since a majority of these digital libraries are institutional repositories with the objective being content archiving, they often lack end-user services needed to make this valuable data useful for the scholarly community. To effectively utilize such data to address the information needs of users, digital libraries should support various end-user services such as document search and browsing, document recommendation, as well as services to make navigation of long PDF documents easier. In recent years, with advances in the field of machine learning for text data, several techniques have been proposed to support such end-user services. However, limited research has been conducted towards integrating such techniques with digital libraries. This research is aimed at building tools and techniques for discovering and accessing the knowledge buried in ETDs, as well as to support end-user services for digital libraries, such as document browsing and long document navigation. First, we review several machine learning models that can be used to support such services. Next, to support a comprehensive evaluation of different models, as well as to train models that are tailored to the ETD data, we introduce several new datasets from the ETD domain. To minimize the resources required to develop high quality training datasets required for supervised training, a novel AI-aided annotation method is also discussed. Finally, we propose techniques and frameworks to support the various digital library services such as search, browsing, and recommendation. The key contributions of this research are as follows: - A system to help with parsing long scholarly documents such as ETDs by means of object-detection methods trained to extract digital objects from long documents. The parsed documents can be used for further downstream tasks such as long document navigation, figure and/or table search, etc. - Datasets to support supervised training of object detection models on scholarly documents of multiple types, such as born-digital and scanned. In addition to manually annotated datasets, a framework (along with the resulting dataset) for AI-aided annotation also is proposed. - A web-based system for information extraction from long PDF theses and dissertations, into a structured format such as XML, aimed at making scholarly literature more accessible to users with disabilities. - A topic-modeling based framework to support exploration tasks such as searching and/or browsing documents (and document portions, e.g., chapters) by topic, document recommendation, topic recommendation, and describing temporal topic trends. Doctor of Philosophy Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain valuable scholarly information that can be of immense value to the research community. Millions of ETDs are now publicly available online, often through one of many online digital libraries. However, since a majority of these digital libraries are institutional repositories with the objective being content archiving, they often lack end-user services needed to make this valuable data useful for the scholarly community. To effectively utilize such data to address the information needs of users, digital libraries should support various end-user services such as document search and browsing, document recommendation, as well as services to make navigation of long PDF documents easier and accessible. Several advances in the field of machine learning for text data in recent years have led to the development of techniques that can serve as the backbone of such end-user services. However, limited research has been conducted towards integrating such techniques with digital libraries. This research is aimed at building tools and techniques for discovering and accessing the knowledge buried in ETDs, by parsing the information contained in the long PDF documents that make up ETDs, into a more compute-friendly format. This would enable researchers and developers to build end-user services for digital libraries. We also propose a framework to support document browsing and long document navigation, which are some of the important end-user services required in digital libraries.

One of the key objectives of the CS-5604 course titled Information Storage and Retrieval is to build a pipeline for a state-of-the-art retrieval system for the Integrated Digital Event Archiving and Library (IDEAL) and Global Event and Trend Archive Research (GETAR) projects. The GETAR project, in collaboration with the Internet Archive, aims to develop an archive of webpages and tweets related to multiple events and trends that occur in the world, and develop a retrieval system to extract information from that archive. Since it is practically impossible to manually look through all the documents in a large corpus, an important component of any retrieval system is a module that is able to group and summarize meaningful information. The Clustering and Topic Analysis (CTA) team aims to build this component for the GETAR project. Our report examines the various techniques underlying clustering and topic analysis, discusses technology choices and implementation details, and, describes the results of the k-means algorithm and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) on different collections of webpages and tweets. Subsequently, we provide a developer manual to help set up our framework, and finally, outline a user manual describing the fields that we populate in HBase. Global Event and Trend Archive Research (GETAR) project, supported by NSF IIS-1619028 Files provided include: cta-fall2017.pdf - PDF version of final report; cta-fall2017.zip - archive of LaTeX files used in Overleaf for the report; Clustering and Topic Analysis - Final Presentation.pdf - PDF version of final presentation; Clustering and Topic Analysis - Final Presentation.pptx - PowerPoint version of final presentation.