University of Illinois

In this Early Career Research Development project, Dr. Kahyun Choi of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will develop an open-source AI framework for digital libraries to explore, curate, and analyze large collections of digitized poetry texts. The project team will identify potentially underrepresented poetry groups; build labeled poetry datasets based on theme and emotion categories; develop artificial intelligence (AI) models for understanding poetry; and incorporate user evaluation and feedback to improve the AI model's performance, fairness, as well as reduce bias. They will publish project results in a toolkit to help future librarians adopt the ethical AI lifecycle to their collections. In addition, the project results will allow public users to explore massive digital collections of poetry using richer metadata tags, such as theme and emotion. Ultimately, this research will increase the exposure and discovery of underrepresented poetry, leading to increased access to diverse literature in digital libraries. This award was originally made to Indiana University and was transferred in September 2024.