IR for Children 2000-2020: Where Are We Now?

Abstract

Over 20 years ago, Information Retrieval (IR) researchers began their quest for sound IR systems for children. The path was not straightforward. Challenges posed by interface design, relevance determination, diverse contexts, ethics, and many more, were taken up and explored from different perspectives. Large projects such as Puppy-IR and the International Children's Digital Library gave this field a certain boost; still, there is neither a sound solution for children in the search area in 2021 nor a roadmap to get there. What is the reason for this? Does the field cry out for specific IR solutions developed on a small scale for very small sub-fields and specific target groups? Are there some significant unforeseen barriers that hinder researchers? What about obstacles natural to areas of study such as this one that require a multidisciplinary approach or involve protected populations? With this workshop, we want to bring together as many key experts as possible from research and industry who focus on IR for children to understand why, unlike other IR areas, this one has not flourished and look for the biggest challenges for the next 10 years. We are not only thinking of traditional researchers and designers, but also of those who develop and use IR systems for fields, such as in music, film, and education, as a way to push past this immobility and look at the problem from new, and perhaps more stimulating, perspectives. CCS CONCEPTS• Social and professional topics → Children; • Information systems → Environment-specific retrieval.

Report on the 1st IR for children 2000--2020

“…The opposite, however, does not hold. Dr. Bilal encouraged IR4C attendees to help bring awareness among the IR community at large on the importance to recognize the implications of research done when children are the main stakeholders [White, 2021]. This is because valuable findings from work related to CIR could serve as another layer towards advancing knowledge in mainstream IR.…”

“…As reported in [Huibers et al, 2021a;White, 2021], over the past two decades IR researchers and industry practitioners have turned their attention to this audience, as evidenced by efforts like Yahooligans! 2 , PuppyIR [Azzopardi et al, 2009], workshops like Towards Accessible Search Systems [Serdyukov et al, 2011] or KidRec [Huibers et al, 2021b], in addition to research works that sporadically make their way into core IR-related conferences.…”

6th KidRec Workshop: Information Retrieval Systems for Children in the COVID-19 Era

“…Framework dimensions address children's needs, assessment metrics, industry vs. academia requirements, ethical and policy considerations, and the point of view of the teacher, a major stakeholder [2,7,10,13]. Except for IR for Children Workshop colocated with ACM SIGIR '21 [6]-dedicated to further understanding from an algorithmic perspective-there are no other workshops that and identify future research paths to nurture and advance the research on recommender systems for children [1]. 2018 Co-located with IDC 2018, explored research and industry efforts surrounding the algorithmic search and recommendation process for children [3].…”