Ion Madrazo Azpiazu

Is Sven Seven?: A Search Intent Module for Children

The Internet is the biggest data-sharing platform, comprised of an immeasurable quantity of resources covering diverse topics appealing to users of all ages. Children shape tomorrows society, so it is essential that this audience becomes agile with searching information. Although young users prefer well-known search engines, their lack of skill in formulating adequate queries and the fact that search tools were not designed explicitly with children in mind, can result in poor outcomes. The reasons for this include childrens limited vocabulary, which makes it challenging to articulate information needs using short queries, or their tendency to create queries that are too long, which translates to few or irrelevant retrieved results. To enhance web search environments in response to childrens behaviors and expectations, in this paper we discuss an initial effort to verify well-known issues, and identify yet to be explored ones, that affect children in formulating (natural language or keyword) queries. We also present a novel search intent module developed in response to these issues, which can seamlessly be integrated with existing search engines favored by children. The proposed module interprets a childs query and creates a shorter and more concise query to submit to a search engine, which can lead to a more successful search session. Initial experiments conducted using a sample of children queries validate the correctness of the proposed search intent module.

Looking for the Movie Seven or Sven from the Movie Frozen?: A Multi-perspective Strategy for Recommending Queries for Children

Popular search engines are usually tuned to satisfy the information needs of a general audience. As a result, non-traditional, yet active groups of users, such as children, experience challenges composing queries that can lead them to the retrieval of adequate results. To aid young users in formulating keyword queries that can facilitate their information-seeking process, we introduce ReQuIK, a multi-perspective query suggestion system for children. ReQuIK informs its suggestion process by applying (i) a strategy based on search intent to capture the purpose of a query, (ii) a ranking strategy based on a wide and deep neural network that considers both raw text and traits commonly associated with kid-related queries, (iii) a filtering strategy based on the readability levels of documents potentially retrieved by a query to favor suggestions that trigger the retrieval of documents matching children»s reading skills, and (iv) a content-similarity strategy to ensure diversity among suggestions. For assessing the quality of the system, we conducted initial offline and online experiments based on 591 queries written by 97 children, ages 6 to 13. The results of this assessment verified the correctness of ReQuIK»s recommendation strategy, the fact that it provides suggestions that appeal to children and ReQuIK»s ability to recommend queries that lead to the retrieval of materials with readability levels that correlate with children»s reading skills.

Scripts for Can We Leverage Rating Patterns from Traditional Users to Enhance Recommendations for Children

Recommender algorithms performance is often associated with the availability of sufficient historical rating data. Unfortunately, when it comes to children, this data is seldom available. In this paper, we report on an initial analysis conducted to examine the degree to which data about traditional users, i.e., adults, can be leveraged to enhance the recommendation process for children.

Measuring Personality for Automatic Elicitation of Privacy Preferences

The increasing complexity and ubiquity in user connectivity, computing environments, information content, and software, mobile, and web applications transfers the responsibility of privacy management to the individuals. Hence, making it extremely difficult for users to maintain the intelligent and targeted level of privacy protection that they need and desire, while simultaneously maintaining their ability to optimally function. Thus, there is a critical need to develop intelligent, automated, and adaptable privacy management systems that can assist users in managing and protecting their sensitive data in the increasingly complex situations and environments that they find themselves in. This work is a first step in exploring the development of such a system, specifically how user personality traits and other characteristics can be used to help automate determination of user sharing preferences for a variety of user data and situations. The Big-Five personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism are examined and used as inputs into several popular machine learning algorithms in order to assess their ability to elicit and predict user privacy preferences. Our results show that the Big-Five personality traits can be used to significantly improve the prediction of user privacy preferences in a number of contexts and situations, and so using machine learning approaches to automate the setting of user privacy preferences has the potential to greatly reduce the burden on users while simultaneously improving the accuracy of their privacy preferences and security.