YooSee: A Video Browser for Children

Moderated YouTube videos are presented using a globe metaphor where the children can browse around the video sphere of content using the continuous horizontal and vertical carousels. The application can be downloaded from the PuppyIR project on Sourceforge.

What and How Children Search on the Web

by Sergio Duarte Torres and Ingmar Weber (Yahoo! Research)

The Internet has become an important part of the daily life of children as a source of information and leisure activities. Nonetheless, given that most of the content available on the web is aimed at the general public, children are constantly exposed to inappropriate content, either because the language goes beyond their reading skills, their attention span differs from grown-ups or simple because the content is not targeted at children as is the case of ads and adult content. In this work we employed a large query log sample from a commercial web search engine to identify the struggles and search behavior of children of the age of 6 to young adults of the age of 18. Concretely we hypothesized that the large and complex volume of information to which children are exposed leads to ill-defined searches and to dis-orientation during the search process. For this purpose, we quantified their search difficulties based on query metrics (e.g. fraction of queries posed in natural language), session metrics (e.g. fraction of abandoned sessions) and click activity (e.g. fraction of ad clicks).

We also used the search logs to retrace stages of child development. Concretely we looked for changes in the user interests (e.g. distribution of topics searched), language development (e.g. readability of the content accessed) and cognitive development (e.g. sentiment expressed in the queries) among children and adults. We observed that these metrics clearly demonstrate an increased level of confusion and unsuccessful search sessions among children. We also found a clear relation between the reading level of the clicked pages and the demographics characteristics of the users such as age and average educational attainment of the zone in which the user is located.

Download paper

Amuse in PuppyIR

A demo of a multimedia search and browsing based interface for children. The interface is designed to facilitate the exploration of video content by browsing with images. This demo was created by Leif Azzopardi, Doug Dowie and Kelly Marshall as part of the PuppyIR project.

Emma Search Service

This demonstrator showcases the PuppyIR framework by incorporating a numerous child specific components developed as part of the PuppyIR project. The Demonstrator is for Emma’s Children’s Hospital in Amsterdam and provides children with a novel and exciting interface to help support their information needs while in hospital or visiting the hospital.

Google Kids: The Sequel

Michael Agger from Slate Magazine discusses PuppyIR research and other search for kids initiatives, see: http://www.slate.com/id/2296824/

Child-oriented multimedia results with collAge

A picture is worth a thousand search results: finding child-oriented multimedia results with collAge

by Karl Gyllstrom and Marie-Francine Moens

We present a simple and effective approach to complement search results for children's web queries with child-oriented multimedia results, such as coloring pages and music sheets. Our approach determines appropriate media types for a query by searching Google's database of frequent queries for co-occurrences of a query's terms (e.g., "dinosaurs") with preselected multimedia terms (e.g., "coloring pages"). We show the effectiveness of this approach through an online user evaluation.

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ImagePile: an Alternative for Vertical Results Lists

by Saskia Akkersdijk, Merel Brandon, Hanna Jochmann-Mannak, Djoerd Hiemstra, and Theo Huibers

Recent work shows that children are very well capable of searching with Google, due to their familiarity with the interface. However, children do have difficulties with the vertical list representation of the results. In this paper, we present an alternative result representation for a touch interface, the ImagePile. The ImagePile displays the results as a pile of images where the user navigates through via horizontal swiping. This representation was tested on a search engine for the Emma child hospital's library. Using a within subject experiment, both representations were tested with children to compare the usability of both systems. The vertical representation was perceived as easier to use, but the ImagePile system was considered more fun to use. Also, with the ImagePile system more relevant results were chosen by the children, and they were more aware of the number of results.

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Expedition Museon: a quest for teams

To show the potential of the technology that is being developed, a group quest through the Museon's exhibitions starting and ending at a multi-touch table is being developed. A small impression of a demonstrator under construction.

Visual Exploration of Health Information for Children

by Frans van der Sluis, Sergio Duarte, Djoerd Hiemstra, Betsy van Dijk and Frea Kruisinga

Children experience several difficulties retrieving information using current Information Retrieval (IR) systems. Particularly, children struggle to find the right keywords to construct queries given their lack of domain knowledge. This problem is even more critical in the case of the specialized health domain. In this work we present a novel method to address this problem using a cross-media search interface in which the textual data is searched through visual images. This solution aims to solve the recall and recognition problem which is salient for health information, by replacing the need for a vocabulary with the easy task of recognising the different body parts.

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Picture-based Querying and Learning

Enabling Picture-based Querying and Learning with the JuSe Interface

by Tamara Polajnar, Richard Glassey, Karl Gyllstrom and Leif Azzopardi

Presented at the Child Computer Interaction: Workshop on UI Technologies and Educational Pedagogy (at CHI)

Identifying Web Sites for Children

A Combined Topical/Non-topical Approach to Identifying Web Sites for Children

by Carsten Eickhoff, Pavel Serdyukov, and Arjen de Vries

Today children interact more and more frequently with information services. Especially in on-line scenarios there is a great amount of content that is not suitable for their age group. Due to the growing importance and ubiquity of the Internet in today's world, denying children any unsupervised Web access is often not possible. This work presents an automatic way of distinguishing web pages for children from those for adults in order to improve child-appropriate web search engine performance. A range of 80 different features based on findings from cognitive sciences and children's psychology are discussed and evaluated. We conducted a large scale user study on the suitability of web sites and give detailed information about the insights gained. Finally a comparison to traditional web classification methods as well as human annotator performance reveals that our automatic classifier can reach a performance close to that of human agreement.

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Query log analysis for children

Query log analysis in the context of Information Retrieval for children

by Sergio Duarte Torres, Djoerd Hiemstra, and Pavel Serdyukov

In this paper we analyze queries and sessions intended to satisfy children’s information needs using a large-scale query log. The aim of this analysis is twofold: i) To identify differences between such queries and sessions, and general queries and sessions; ii) To enhance the query log by including annotations of queries, sessions, and actions for future research on information retrieval for children. We found statistically significant differences between the set of general purpose and queries seeking for content intended for children. We show that our findings are consistent with previous studies on the physical behavior of children using Web search engines.

The paper will be presented at the ACM SIGIR 2010 Conference, 19-23 July 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland

[download preprint]

Need better support for web search by children?

Yahoo! terms of service force parents of children under the age of 13 to create a Yahoo! Family Account, and this way certify that you are the legal guardian of the child/children listed on this account. They explain that this allows children to access many areas of the Yahoo! Services, including, email, message boards and instant messaging (among others), and then simply put responsibility to determine suitability for children in the parents hands - suggesting that you should find a way to limit access to unsuitable content...

Interesting: as opposed to Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft Bing's terms of service seem to mention no restrictions on age.

We organize a workshop on accessible search at SIGIR on 23 July 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Current search systems are not adequate for individuals with specific needs: children, older adults, people with visual or motor impairments, and people with intellectual disabilities or low literacy. Search services are typically created for average users (young or middle-aged adults without physical or mental disabilities) and information retrieval methods are based on their perception of relevance as well. The workshop will be the first ever to raise the discussion on how to make search engines accessible for different types of users, including those with problems in reading, writing or comprehension of complex content. Search accessibility means that people whose abilities are considerably different from those that average users have will be able to use search systems with the same success.

The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum and initiate collaborations between academics and industrial practitioners interested in making search more usable for users in general and for users with specific needs in particular. We encourage presentation and participation from researchers working at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, ambient intelligence and related areas. The workshop will be a mix of oral presentations for long papers (maximum of 8 pages), a session for posters (maximum of 2 pages) and a panel discussion. All submissions will be reviewed by at least two PC members. Workshop proceedings will be available at the workshop. The workshop welcomes, but is not limited to, contributions on a range of the following key issues:

• Understanding of search behavior of users with specific needs
• Understanding of relevance criteria of users with specific needs
• Understanding the effects of domain expertise, age, user experience and cognitive abilities on search goals and results evaluation
• Non-topical aspects of relevance: text style, readability, appropriateness of language (harassment and explicit content detection)
• Development of test collections for evaluation of accessible search systems
• Collaborative search techniques for assisting users with specific needs (e.g. parents helping children)
• Potential of search personalization techniques to satisfy users with specific needs
• Search interfaces and result representation for people with specific needs
• Using assistive technologies for interaction with search systems, e.g. speech recognition or eye tracking software for querying and browsing.

See the Workshop website.

IDC 2010 in Barcelona

The 9th international conference on interaction design and children in Barcelona, Spain. http://www.iua.upf.es/idc2010/

Google: No kids allowed

Interesting post (though almost a year ago) by Chris Soghoian:

Google's terms of service, while ignored by the vast majority of users, contain a pretty shocking clause: Under 18's are not permitted to use any of Google's Web properties. That's right, kids--no search, YouTube, Gmail, news, or images.

See: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9902548-46.html

First PuppyIR search architecture

PuppyIR: Designing an Open Source Framework for Interactive Information Services for Children

by Leif Azzopardi, Richard Glassey, Mounia Lalmas, Tamara Polajnar, and Ian Ruthven

One of the main aims of the PuppyIR project is to provide an open source framework for the development of Interactive Information Retrieval Services. The main focus of the project is directed towards developing such services for children, which introduces a number of novel and challenging issues to address (such as language development, security, moderation, etc).

In this poster paper, we outline the preliminary high-level design of the open source framework. The framework uses a layered architecture to minimize dependencies between the user-side concerns of interaction and presentation, and the system-side concerns of aggregating content from multiple sources and processing information appropriately. Each layer will consist of a series of interchangeable components, which can be interconnected to form a complete service. To facilitate the construction of diverse information services, a dataflow language is proposed to enable the assembly of the components in an intuitive and visual manner. One of the the design goals of the architecture, and ultimate measures of success, is to provide a “lego” style building block environment in which researchers and developers of any age can build their own information service. The poster provides the starting point for the design of the framework and aims to seek comments, feedback and suggestions from the community in order to improve and refine the architecture.

The paper will be presented at the presented at the HCIR 2009, the Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval workshop in Washington DC on 23 October.

[download pdf]

Plenary in Madrid

October 5th and 6th brought the PuppyIR partners to Madrid. User parties Emma Kinderziekenhuis and Museon have created very nice scenarios that help steer the research activities. Main target user community is children aged 4-12. The first paper is out, planning to build technology on top of the OpenSearch proposal. A PuppyIR system then is nothing more than a search mashup. Many ideas to be explored!!!