Tag Archives: iiix

EmSe: initial evaluation of a child-friendly medical search system

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by The PuppyIR team.

When undergoing medical treatment in combination with extended stays in hospitals, children have been frequently found to develop an interest in their condition and the course of treatment. A natural means of searching for related information would be to use a web search engine. The medical domain, however, imposes several key challenges on young and inexperienced searchers, such as difficult terminology, potentially frightening topics or non-objective information offered by lobbyists or pharmaceutical companies. To address these problems, we present the design and usability study of EmSe, a search service for children in a hospital environment. Read the paper.

An analysis of queries intended to search information for children

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by Sergio Duarte Torres, Djoerd Hiemstra and Pavel Serdyukov. 

The majority of children and teenagers are active users of the Internet for education and entertainment purposes, thus developing children’s abilities to find and understand information is a key in their development as young adults. However, children’sability to use the Internet is severely hampered by the lack of appropriate search tools. Most Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed for adults: they return information in a form that is unsuitable for children.The aim of this presentation is twofold: (i) introduce the research lines and outcome of the PuppyIR project which is aimed at providing a infrastructure and framework for developing child-focused information service; and (ii) explore the outcome of our research on understanding the search behavior of children in the Internet and provide a brief description of query recommendation mechanisms tailored at young users. Read the paper.