Interaction-based information filtering for children

This paper presents an interaction-based information filtering system designed for the needs of children accessing multiple streams of information. This is an emerging problem due to the increased information access and engagement by children for their education and entertainment, and the explosion of stream-based information sources on most topics. It has been shown that children have difficulties formulating text-based queries and using interfaces primarily designed for adults. The in-progress system presented in this paper attempts to address these difficulties by employing an interaction-based interface that simplifies the expression of information needs and adapts itself to user interests over time. To overcome issues of content moderation, the system aggregates multiple child-friendly information feeds and performs offline processing to facilitate topic filtering. A set of standing topics are created for initial interaction and subsequent interactions are used to infer and refine which topics the child would most likely want to have presented. A simple and easy-to-use interface is presented which uses relevance information to determine the appropriate size of the document title to display to act as a relevance-cue to the user. The planned research focuses on validating the interaction-based approach with both child and adult populations to discover the differences and similarities that may exist.