Open educational resource based information understanding via pdf document interaction.

While classical information retrieval and recommendation can provide users effective information access, for scientific documents, i.e., scientific publications, however, understanding the content of scientific publications remains daunting, i.e., Information Access -- Information Understanding. In order to help students and junior scholars better understand the essence of scientific topics discussed in scholarly papers, we propose an innovative approach to recommend high-quality open educational resources (OER), such as presentation slides, tutorials, video lectures, project source code, and Wikipedia pages, collected from a number of social media systems. The proposed new system -- OER-based Collaborative PDF Reader (OCPR) -- captures students' emerging implicit/explicit information needs when reading a scientific paper, while recommending OERs to assist them better understand the target paper.