Abstract
Children struggle with translating their information needs into effective queries to initiate the search process. In this paper, we explore the degree to which the use of a Vocal Assistant (VA) as an intermediary between a child and a search engine can ease query formulation and foster completion of successful searches. We also examine the potential influence VA can have on the search process when compared to a traditional keyboard-driven approach. This comparison motivates the second contribution of our work, an evaluation framework that covers 4 dimensions: (1) a new search strategy (VA) for (2) a specific user group (children) given (3) a particular task (answering questions) in (4) a defined environment (school). The proposed framework can be adopted by the research community to conduct comprehensive assessments of search systems given new interaction methods, user groups, contexts, and tasks.
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Notes
- 1.
A detailed discussion of Sonny’s functionalities can we found in [14].
- 2.
Parents signed a consent form allowing children to take part of the study. Collected data was anonymized to ensure privacy of the population under study.
- 3.
Query log data pertaining to session duration might be biased, e.g., problems with poor connection affect session length. Researcher observation, however, serve as another confirmation factor on shorter length for VA-initiated sessions.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank children in the after school program at the Leonardo da Vinci school in Lugano and Thomas Del Prete for helping us conduct the study. Work partially funded by NSF Award 1565937.
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Landoni, M., Matteri, D., Murgia, E., Huibers, T., Pera, M.S. (2019). Sonny, Cerca! Evaluating the Impact of Using a Vocal Assistant to Search at School. In: Crestani, F., et al. Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction. CLEF 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11696. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28577-7_6
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