Research Projects

IMLS Early Career Research Project: Unbiased AI for Poetry Analysis: Toward Equitable and Diverse Digital Libraries

• Project Members: Kahyun Choi (PI), Gyuri Kang (RA, Summer 2024), You Peng (RA, Fall 2025 -), William Sideri (RA, Fall 2025-)
• Period: Aug. 2022 – Feb. 2027
• Status: Ongoing; Follow-up grant proposal submitted
• Funding Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services, Early Career Research Development project of Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program
• Budget: $420,819
• Publications
  • Peng You, Gyuri Kang, William Sideri, Kahyun Choi, “Poetry Annotator: A Structure-Preserving Web-based Tool for Online-Offline Annotation of Underrepresented Poetry Collections,” DH2026, 2026
  • Kahyun Choi and Haining Wang, “An AI-Annotated Large-Scale Dataset of Public-Domain Poems for Digital Humanities Research and Teaching,” DH2026, 2026
  • Gyuri Kang and Kahyun Choi, “A Dataset of American Poetry by Poets from Historically Underrepresented Groups in the HathiTrust Digital Library,” Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD), 2026
  • Kahyun Choi and Gyuri Kang, “An Analysis of Poet Demographic and Thematic Diversity in a Poetry Collection for Inclusive AI,” in Proceedings of the 20th iConference, 2025
  • Kahyun Choi, “Word Embedding-Based Text Complexity Analysis,” in Proceedings of the 19th iConference, 2024
  • Kahyun Choi, “Computational Thematic Analysis of Poetry via Bimodal Large Language Models,” the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), 2023

IMLS Library Leadership Project: AI & Co-design in public libraries: Empowering underserved youth to cultivate symbiotic relationships between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their communities

• Project Description: We developed an asset-based, participatory design–based AI literacy program for underserved youth through public libraries, empowering youth to engage critically with AI and its role in their communities.
• Project Members: Hee Rin Lee (PI), Kahyun Choi (Co-PI), Soo Hyeon Kim (Research scientist), Selin Akgun (RA), Ji Youn Shin (RA), Huajie Cao (RA), Pooja Malvi (RA), Meredith Dedema (RA)
• Period: Aug. 2021 – Jul. 2025
• Status: Completed; Follow-up grant proposals submitted; Publications Ongoing
• Funding Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Leadership Grants
• Budget: $249,999 total ($97,741 Co-PI share)
• Project Page: https://ailiteracy.msu.edu/ (Open-source AI literacy educational materials available)
• Publications
  • Selin Akgun, Kahyun Choi, Hee Rin Lee, “Designing Critical AI Literacy Program for K-8 STEM Education: Adopting Community-Centered Approach,” Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research (DISER), 2026
  • Huajie Cao, Kahyun Choi, Hee Rin Lee, “AI literacy for Underserved Students: Exploring an Asset-Based Approach to Library-Based AI Literacy Program,” In the Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2025
  • Soo Hyeon Kim, Gi Woong Choi, Kahyun Choi, Andrea Copeland, Christine D’Arpa, Sarah Evans, Simpson Lance, Hee Rin Lee, Ayoung Yoon, “Public Library-University Research Partnerships in Library and Information Science: Exploring the Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies for Community-Engaged Scholarship,” Library Quarterly, 2025
  • Soo Hyeon Kim, Gi Woong Choi, Kahyun Choi, Andrea Copeland, Christine D’Arpa, Sarah Evans, Simpson Lance, Hee Rin Lee, Ayoung Yoon, “Public Library-University Partnerships in Library and Information Science: Approaches, Challenges, Implications for Translating Research into Practice,” the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) [Panel], 2023
  • Ji Youn Shin, Kahyun Choi, Hee Rin Lee, “Community-engaged design for STEM education: Students as co-designers of AI programs in public libraries,” in Child-Centered AI Design: Definition, Operation, and Considerations, ACM CHI 2023 Workshop, 2023
  • Hee Rin Lee, Kahyun Choi, Selin Akgun, Ji Youn Shin, Pooja Malvi, Meredith Dedema, “AI & Co-design in public libraries: Empowering underserved youth to cultivate symbiotic relationships between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their communities,” in ASIS&T SIG AI Workshop, 2022. (Best Presentation Award)

Luddy Fellowship: AI for Literature

• Project Description: In this project, we developed AI-based natural language processing (NLP) systems designed to achieve a high-level understanding of poetry, including its emotions and themes. The project explored three main questions: 1) Can advanced deep learning–based language models, such as BERT, identify the emotions and themes expressed in poems? 2) Can models trained on song lyrics be repurposed for poem analysis, given the shared characteristics between lyrics and poetry? 3) Do auxiliary data sources, such as authors’ notes on their poems and crowdsourced word and emotion annotations, provide additional information that improves computational analysis of poetic content?
• Project Members: Kahyun Choi (PI and Fellow)
• Period: 2021–2022 Academic Year
• Status: Completed; Foundation for subsequent IMLS Early Career grant
• Program: Luddy Faculty Fellows Program
• Budget: $25,000
• Link: https://luddy.iu.edu/research/
• Publications
  • Kahyun Choi, “Computational Thematic Analysis of Poetry via Bimodal Large Language Models,” the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), 2023

A Comparative Analysis of Poetry Reading Audio: Singing, Narrating, or Somewhere In Between?

• Project Description:
• Status: Journal Extension in Progress; Grant proposal submitted
• Publications
  • Kahyun Choi and Minje Kim, “A Comparative Analysis of Poetry Reading Audio: Singing, Narrating, or Somewhere In Between?” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2024

Feature Reconstruction

• Project Description:
• Status: Follow-up research in progress
• Publications
  • Haven Kim and Kahyun Choi, “LyCon: Lyrics Reconstruction from the Bag-of-Words Using Large Language Models,” the 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), 2024