Who are you?: Identifying Young Users from a Single Search Query
Benjamin Bettencourt, Assoumer Redempta Manzi Muneza, Michael Green, Samantha Anguiano, Jerry Alan Fails, Casey Kennington, Katherine Landau Wright, Maria Soledad Pera. 2023. “Who are you?: Identifying Young Users from a Single Search Query”. In IAdjunct Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2023). ACM, pp. 305-310. DOI:10.1145/3563359.3596992
Abstract
As an initial step towards enabling the adaptation of (popular, and widely used) web search environments so that they can better serve children and ease their path towards information discovery, we introduce Recognizing Young Searchers (RYSe). RYSe leverages lexical, syntactical, spelling/punctuation, and vocabulary features that align with the Concrete Operational stage of development (originally identified by Jean Piaget) in an attempt to identify users that are in this stage. The concrete operational stage is commonly associated with children ages 7-11. Findings emerging from our initial empirical exploration using single queries formulated by children and sample queries from adults showcase the feasibility of relying on different cognitive traits inferred from the short text of a single query to distinguish those that are formulated by younger searchers.