Reinforcement Learning for Automated Literature Screening: Enhancing E-Learning and University Research Classification in Computer Science

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a successful and established Artificial Intelligence (AI) method, particularly with recent groundbreaking progress in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Reinforcement learning is very well suited for sequential decision-making tasks, wherein a learned agent learns an optimal policy after many interactions with an environment. The present paper examines the application of reinforcement learning for automating screening of literature in academic research, particularly in the fields of computer science and e-learning. Keyword filtering techniques, while predominantly applied, are found to be inflexible as well as unable to capture the dynamic nature of research themes. To overcome such constraints, we present a Deep Q-Network (DQN)-based reinforcement learning model that combines reinforcement learning with the Semantic Scholar API to enhance research paper classification based on dynamically acquired decision rules. The proposed reinforcement learning model was trained and tested with a dataset of 8,934 research papers, accessed by systematic searching. The agent filtered and picked 11 effective papers depending on improved selection criteria like publi