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紧急搜索者（最初是6-11岁的儿童）的能力，这些搜索工具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搜索引擎，对儿童搜索需求的支持也很弱，因为它们正在发展与拼写、语言使用（包括同义词）、理解类别、细化查询以及评估结果的相关性和质量有关的技能。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，并理解查询和返回结果之间的关系。该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）通过反复开发为6-11岁儿童设计的CAST（儿童自适应搜索工具），设计支持儿童搜索能力的工具。 CAST将被设计为对用户的文化水平和成熟度以及他们的正式查询中缺失的搜索意图进行建模和响应。例如，当孩子提交查询“老虎”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，这可能比关于老虎伍兹的信息更好地与孩子的搜索意图相关。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。在这项研究中，关于支持儿童这一特殊人群的搜索的结果也有可能为针对其他人群的类似问题和方法提供信息，这些人群可能在搜索能力方面存在系统性差异，从老年人到第二语言使用者。第一个是教育研究透镜，根据儿童的已知需求进行设计活动，例如，使用拼写发展研究来创建针对这一受众的拼写纠正模型，而不是基于一般字典的拼写纠正算法。第二种是参与式设计，称为合作探究，在整个设计过程中，儿童和教师沿着与研究小组密切参与，使研究小组能够受益于儿童对其自身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其自身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，收集儿童搜索行为的公开数据集，词汇列表，儿童热门网站以及其他可以为儿童搜索提供信息的模型和算法。 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，以帮助儿童更好地表达他们的搜索需求，沿着工具，如增强的结果片段，用于评估结果的质量和相关性。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到的行为进行定量分析，例如查询，会话长度和返回结果质量，以及与儿童和教师进行直接测试，以评估他们对系统可用性的看法以及他们未来使用它的意愿。 该团队将使用评估来反复衡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一些公共图书馆，供研究环境之外的儿童使用。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.