CHS: Medium: CAST: Child Adaptive Search Tool

该项目的目标是通过研究、设计和开发搜索工具来增强新兴搜索者的能力——最初是6-11岁的儿童——通过建模和适应他们的搜索能力来提高他们的信息素养和搜索能力。目前的搜索引擎，即使是专门为儿童设计的，对儿童搜索需求的支持也很弱，因为儿童在拼写、语言使用（包括同义词）、理解类别、精炼查询以及评估结果的相关性和质量方面的技能还在发展。这使得孩子们很难创建有效的查询，使用搜索引擎建议的结果，以及理解查询和返回结果之间的关系。项目团队汇集了人机交互、信息检索、自然语言处理和教育方面的专业知识，将(a)进一步科学地了解儿童的搜索能力，(b)通过为6-11岁儿童设计的CAST（儿童自适应搜索工具）的迭代开发来设计工具以支持这一能力。CAST将被设计用来模拟和响应用户的读写能力和成熟度水平，以及他们的正式查询中缺少的搜索意图。例如，当一个孩子提交“老虎”的查询时，CAST将倾向于优先考虑老虎栖息地或小熊维尼的朋友跳跳虎，这可能比老虎伍兹的信息更符合孩子的搜索意图。为了实现这一目标，该团队将在整个项目过程中与儿童和教师合作，与当地几所学校的合作伙伴合作，以增加应用程序本身的影响，并改善结果的传播。本研究中对特殊儿童群体的支持搜索的结果也有可能为针对其他可能在搜索能力上存在系统差异的人群（从老年人到第二语言使用者）提供类似的问题和方法。该团队将使用两个主要镜头来指导项目工作。第一种是教育研究视角，将设计活动建立在儿童已知需求的基础上，例如，使用拼写发展研究来创建适合这一受众的拼写纠正模型，而不是一般的基于字典的拼写纠正算法。第二种是参与式设计的一种版本，称为合作探究，在整个设计过程中，儿童和教师以及研究团队都密切参与，使团队受益于儿童对自己需求的直接感知和解决这些需求的想法，以及教师在学习搜索信息以支持自己的教育时对儿童需求的了解。这项工作将分三个主要阶段进行。第一阶段的重点是定义需求和资源，通过与当地公立学校合作，收集公开可用的儿童搜索行为数据集、词汇表、儿童热门网站和其他资源，这些资源可以为儿童搜索的模型和算法提供信息。第二阶段涉及设计和开发CAST的初始版本，其中包括支持查询公式、拼写和导航本体的方法，以帮助孩子们更好地表达他们的搜索需求，以及用于评估结果质量和相关性的增强结果片段等工具。第三阶段将侧重于评估单个组件和整体系统质量；这包括对系统中可观察行为的定量分析，如查询、会话长度、返回结果质量，以及对儿童和教师的直接测试，以评估他们对系统可用性的看法，以及他们继续使用系统的意愿。该团队将使用评估来迭代地测量单个组件和整个系统，该系统将部署在项目团队所在州的许多公共图书馆，供研究环境之外的儿童使用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The goal of the project is to empower emergent searchers -- initially children ages 6-11 -- by researching, designing, and developing search tools that improve their information literacy and searching capabilities through modeling and adapting to their abilities as they search. Current search engines, even ones specifically designed for children, offer weak support for children's search needs due to their developing skills related to spelling, language use (including synonyms), understanding categories, refining queries, and evaluating relevance and quality of results. This makes it hard for children to create effective queries, use the results suggested by the search engine, and understand the relationship between the queries and the results returned. Bringing together expertise in human-computer interaction, information retrieval, natural language processing, and education, the project team will both (a) further scientific understanding of children's search abilities, and (b) design tools to support it through the iterative development of CAST (Child Adaptive Search Tool), designed for children aged 6-11. CAST will be designed to model and respond to users' literacy and maturity levels as well as search intent missing from their formal queries. For example, when a child submits the query "Tiger", CAST will tend to prioritize tiger habitat or Winnie the Pooh's friend Tigger, which likely correlate better to a child's search intent than information on Tiger Woods. To reach this goal, the team will collaborate with children and teachers throughout the course of the project, working with partners in several local schools to increase the impact of the application itself and to improve the dissemination of the results. The results on supporting search in the special population of children in this research also have the potential to inform similar problems and methods aimed at other populations who might have systematic differences in their search ability, from older adults to second language speakers.The team will use two main lenses to guide the project work. The first is an educational research lens that grounds design activities in the known needs of children, for example, using spelling development research to create models of spelling correction that are tailored to this audience rather than general dictionary-based spelling correction algorithms. The second is a version of participatory design called cooperative inquiry that closely involves both children and teachers along with the research team throughout the design process, allowing the team to benefit from children's direct perceptions of their own needs and ideas for addressing them as well as the teachers' knowledge of children's needs when learning to search for information to support their own education. The work will proceed in three main phases. The first phase focuses on defining requirements and resources, through partnering with local public schools and collecting publicly available datasets of children's search behavior, vocabulary lists, popular websites for kids, and other resources that can inform models and algorithms tuned to children's search. The second phase involves designing and developing an initial version of CAST that includes methods to support query formulation, spelling, and navigating ontologies in order to help children better express their search needs, along with tools such as enhanced result snippets for evaluating the quality and relevance of results. The third phase will focus on evaluating both individual components and overall system quality; this includes using quantitative analysis of observable behaviors in the system such as queries, session lengths, and returned result quality as well as direct testing with children and teachers to evaluate their perceptions of the system's usability and their willingness to use it going forward. The team will use the evaluations to iteratively measure both individual components and the overall system, which will be deployed at a number of public libraries in the project team's home state for use by children outside of the research context.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.