Maria Soledad Pera

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Delft University of Technology

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 tomorrow's 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...

Popular tools used to search for online resources are tuned to satisfy a broad category of users---primarily adults. Because children have specific needs, these tools may not always be successful in offering the right level of support in their quest for information. While search tools often provide query assistance, children still face many difficu...

We present a multiattentive recurrent neural network architecture for automatic multilingual readability assessment. This architecture considers raw words as its main input, but internally captures text structure and informs its word attention process using other syntax- and morphology-related datapoints, known to be of great importance to readabil...

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 potentia...

Multistakeholder recommender systems are those that account for the impacts and preferences of multiple groups of individuals, not just the end users receiving recommendations. Due to their complexity, evaluating these systems cannot be restricted to the overall utility of a single stakeholder, as is often the case of more mainstream recommender sy...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to significantly impact various socio-technical systems, offering transformative possibilities for improved interaction between humans and technology. However, their integration poses complex challenges due to the intricate interplay between societal structures, human behaviour, and technological innovation...

Multistakeholder recommender systems are defined as those that account for ``the preferences of multiple parties when generating recommendations, especially when these parties are on different sides of the recommendation interaction.'' Due to their complexity, evaluating these systems cannot be restricted to the overall utility of a single stakehol...

In this report, we summarise the program and takeaways from the 1 st edition of the Workshop on Information Retrieval for Understudied Users (IR4U2), co-located with the 46 th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). Date : 24 March 2024. Website : https://ir4u2workshop.wixsite.com/ir4u2.

In the current digital landscape, humans take center stage. This has caused a paradigm shift in the realm of intelligent technologies, prompting researchers and (industry) practitioners to reflect on the challenges and complexities involved in understanding the (potential) users of the technologies they develop. In this chapter, we provide an overv...

Information Retrieval (IR) remains an active, fast-paced area of research. However, most advances in IR have predominantly benefited the so-called “classical” users, e.g., English-speaking adults. We envision IR4U2as a forum to spotlight efforts that, while sparse, consider diverse, and often understudied, user groups when designing, developing, as...

Web search has evolved into a platform people rely on for opinion formation on debated topics. Yet, pursuing this search intent can carry serious consequences for individuals and society and involves a high risk of biases. We argue that web search can and should empower users to form opinions responsibly and that the information retrieval community...

In this work, we reason how focusing on Information Retrieval (IR) for children and involving them in participatory studies would benefit the IR community. The Child Computer Interaction (CCI) community has embraced the child as a protagonist as their main philosophy, regarding children as informants, co-designers, and evaluators, not just users. L...

Information Retrieval (IR) systems have a wide range of impacts on consumers. We offer maps to help identify goals IR systems could—or should—strive for, and guide the process of scoping how to gauge a wide range of consumer-side impacts and the possible interventions needed to address these effects. Grounded in prior work on scoping algorithmic im...

This year, the 21st edition of the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR), was hosted by TU Delft. Following a series of online interactions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this edition returned to its traditional in-person format. In this report, we provide a summary of the program and discuss key insights and lessons learned gleaned fro...

Recommender Systems support a broad range of domains, each with peculiarities that recommendation algorithms must consider to produce appropriate suggestions. In the paper, we bring attention to a little-studied scenario related to the news domain: recommendations catering to media journalists. Based on the particular needs inherent to a newsroom,...

We introduce a novel re-ranking model that aims to augment the functionality of standard search engines to support classroom search activities for children (ages 6 to 11). This model extends the known listwise learning-to-rank framework by balancing risk and reward. Doing so enables the model to prioritize Web resources of high educational alignmen...

Social networks are a platform for individuals and organizations to connect with each other and inform, advertise, spread ideas, and ultimately influence opinions. These platforms have been known to propel misinformation. We argue that this could be compounded by the recommender algorithms that these platforms use to suggest items potentially of in...

This paper contributes to the discussion initiated in a recent SIGIR paper describing a gap in the information retrieval (IR) literature on query understanding–where they come from and whether they serve their purpose. Particularly the connection between query variability and search engines regarding consistent and equitable access to all users. We...

Using online information discovery as a case study, in this position paper we discuss the need to design, develop, and deploy (conversational) agents that can -- non-intrusively -- guide children in their quest for online resources rather than simply finding resources for them. We argue that agents should "let children learn" and should be built to...

We summarize the outcomes of the most recent KidRec Workshop (June 2022), which was held for the first time in a hybrid, synchronous mode. The focus of the workshop was to understand the impact of the COVID-19 era on the design, development, and evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems for which children are the primary stakeholders. Date: June...

Researchers worldwide have explored the behavioral nuances that emerge from interactions of individuals afflicted by mental health disorders (MHD) with persuasive technologies, mainly social media. Yet, there is a gap in the analysis pertaining to a persuasive technology that is part of their everyday lives: web search engines (SE). Each day, users...

This forum provides a space to engage with the challenges of designing for intelligent algorithmic experiences. We invite articles that tackle the tensions between research and practice when integrating AI and UX design. We welcome interdisciplinary debate, artful critique, forward-looking research, case studies of AI in practice, and speculative d...

In this manuscript, we discuss the findings from an introductory survey conducted with more than 50 teachers in Italy. We inquired about teachers’ opinions of educational technology used in the classroom, in particular search tools. Qualitative and quantitative data inferred from collected responses provide us with a multifaceted picture of the dif...

In this manuscript, we argue for the need to further look at search as learning (SAL) with children as the primary stakeholders. Inspired by how children learn and considering the classroom (regardless of the teaching modality) as a natural educational ecosystem, we posit that scaffolding is the tie that can simultaneously allow for learning to sea...

The last several years have brought a growing body of work on ensuring that recommender systems are in some sense consumer-fair -- that is, they provide comparable quality of service, accuracy of representation, and other effects to their users. However, there are many different strategies to make systems more fair and a range of intervention point...

Exposure to technology impacts children’s perception and conceptualisation of the way devices they regularly use work. This prompts us to study if almost two years of online teaching, enabled by a broad range of technologies, have influenced the way children imagine a search companion would look and behave when helping them perform school-related s...

The use of clarifying questions (CQs) is a fairly new and useful technique to aid systems in recognizing the intent, context, and preferences behind user queries. Yet, understanding the extent of the effect of CQs on user behavior and the ability to identify relevant information remains relatively unexplored. In this work, we conduct a large user s...

Readability is a core component of information retrieval (IR) tools as the complexity of a resource directly affects its relevance: a resource is only of use if the user can comprehend it. Even so, the link between readability and IR is often overlooked. As a step towards advancing knowledge on the influence of readability on IR, we focus on Web se...

We summarize outcomes from the 2021 KidRec Workshop, co-located with the ACM Interaction Design and Children conference. The theme of the 5 th edition of KidRec was Search and Recommendation Technology through the Lens of a Teacher. During the workshop, we discussed why teachers are one of the main stakeholders when designing information retrieval...

We present a brief overview of the discussions and takeaways emerging from the IR for Children 2000--2020: Where Are We Now? Workshop, co-located with the 44 th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Date : 15 July, 2021. Website : http://www.fab4.science/IR4C/.

In this report, we offer a brief overview of the contributions and takeaways from the Joint KaRS & ComplexRec Workshop, co-located with the 15 th edition of the ACM RecSys in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. With this workshop, we aimed to merge the main objectives envisioned for the 3 rd Edition of the Workshop of Knowledge-aware and Conversational Rec...

We present pathways of investigation regarding conversational user interfaces (CUIs) for children in the classroom. We highlight anticipated challenges to be addressed in order to advance knowledge on CUIs for children. Further, we discuss preliminary ideas on strategies for evaluation.

Recent developments in the mobile app industry have resulted in various types of mobile apps, each targeting a different need and a specific audience. Consequently, users access distinct apps to complete their information need tasks. This leads to the use of various apps not only separately, but also collaboratively in the same session to achieve a...

Recent developments in the mobile app industry have resulted in various types of mobile apps, each targeting a different need and a specific audience. Consequently, users access distinct apps to complete their information need tasks. This leads to the use of various apps not only separately, but also collaboratively in the same session to achieve a...

Children’s ability to spell effectively is a major barrier to using search engines successfully. While search engines make use of spellcheckers to provide spelling corrections to their users, they are designed for more traditional users (i.e., adults) and have proven inadequate for children. The specific target of children for this research are tho...

In the classroom, search tools enable students to access online resources. While these tools have many benefits in theory, in practice there are also ethical issues to consider. In this article, we discuss a number of ethics-related problems teachers are faced with and they need to find solutions for. Based on our own research experience developing...

Research in the area of search engines for children remains in its infancy. Seminal works have studied how children use mainstream search engines, as well as how to design and evaluate custom search engines explicitly for children. These works, however, tend to take a one-size-fits-all view, treating children as a unit. Nevertheless, even at the sa...

In the classroom environment, search tools are the means for students to access Web resources. The perspectives of students, researchers, and industry practitioners lead the ongoing research debate in this area. In this article, we argue in favor of incorporating a new voice into this debate: teachers. We showcase the value of involving teachers in...

Past and current research has typically focused on ensuring that search technology for the classroom serves children. In this paper, we argue for the need to broaden the research focus to include teachers and how search technology can aid them. In particular, we share how furnishing a behind-the-scenes portal for teachers can empower them by provid...

In this paper, we present BiGBERT, a deep learning model that simultaneously examines URLs and snippets from web resources to determine their alignment with children’s educational standards. Preliminary results inferred from ablation studies and comparison with baselines and state-of-the-art counterparts, reveal that leveraging domain knowledge to...

The potential threat that domestic animals pose to the health of human populations tends to be overlooked. We posit that positive steps forward can be made in this area, via suitable state-wide public policy. In this paper, we describe the data collection process that took place in Casilda (a city in Argentina), in the context of a canine census. W...

We summarize outcomes from KidRec 2020, the 4 th edition of the workshop on International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems; which this year was co-located with the ACM Interaction Design and Children conference. In addition to lessons learned from the keynote address by Professor Marcia...

The alignment of word embedding spaces in different languages into a common crosslingual space has recently been in vogue. Strategies that do so compute pairwise alignments and then map multiple languages to a single pivot language (most often English). These strategies, however, are biased towards the choice of the pivot language, given that langu...

Purpose This paper investigates how school teachers look for informational texts for their classrooms. Access to current, varied and authentic informational texts improves learning outcomes for K-12 students, but many teachers lack resources to expand and update readings. The Web offers freely available resources, but finding suitable ones is time-...

Evaluation of information retrieval systems (IRS) is a prominent topic among information retrieval researchers--mainly directed at a general population. Children require unique IRS and by extension different ways to evaluate these systems, but as a large population that use IRS have largely been ignored on the evaluation front. In this position pap...

Multilingual machine translation has recently been in vogue given its potential for improving machine translation performance for low-resource languages via transfer learning. Empirical examinations demonstrating the success of existing multilingual machine translation strategies, however, are limited to experiments in specific language groups. In...

For help with their spelling errors, children often turn to spellcheckers integrated in software applications like word processors and search engines. However, existing spellcheckers are usually tuned to the needs of traditional users (i.e., adults) and generally prove unsatisfactory for children. Motivated by this issue, we introduce K S , an Engl...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine strengths and limitations that search engines (SEs) exhibit when responding to web search queries associated with the grade school curriculum.\newline Design/methodology/approach: The authors employed a simulation-based experimental approach to conduct an in-depth empirical examination of SEs and us...

This short review discusses the outcomes of the 3 rd Workshop of the International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec 2019) , co-located with the 2019 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, which took place June 12-15 in Boise, Idaho, USA. The goal for the workshop w...

We present StoryTime, a book recommender for children. Our web-based recommender is co-designed with children and uses images to elicit their preferences. By building on existing solutions related to both visual interfaces and book recommendation strategies for children, StoryTime can generate suggestions without historical data or adult guidance....

As part of the main program of the 2019 ACM Recommender System Conference, the Late-Breaking Results offers a unique opportunity to share with the community the latest ideas related to recommender systems. This year, we received 42 submissions for the track, out of which 13 were accepted, resulting in a acceptance rate of 31%.

Most research efforts related to automatic readability assessment focus on the design of strategies that apply to a specific language. These state‐of‐the‐art strategies are highly dependent on linguistic features that best suit the language for which they were intended, constraining their adaptability and making it difficult to determine whether th...

In this position paper, we highlight a number of issues that exist with the use of traditional metrics in evaluating recommender systems when children are the target audience. Our focus is on discrepancies that arise as a result of the differing rating behaviour of adult users when compared to children, and how these differences can warrant a recon...

Given how ingrained Search Engines (SEs) are in educational environments, it is essential to evaluate their performance in response to inquiries that pertain to the classroom setting. In this position paper, we discuss the limitations of relying solely on traditional Information Retrieval metrics and usability studies. We argue in favor of a new co...

Given how ingrained Search Engines (SEs) are in educational environments, it is essential to evaluate their performance in response to inquiries that pertain to the classroom setting. In this position paper, we discuss the limitations of relying solely on traditional Information Retrieval metrics and usability studies. We argue in favor of a new co...

Children use popular web search tools, which are generally designed for adult users. Because children have different developmental needs than adults, these tools may not always adequately support their search for information. Moreover, even though search tools offer support to help in query formulation, these too are aimed at adults and may hinder...

Today's children spend considerable time online, searching and receiving information from various websites and apps. While searching for information, e.g. for school or hobbies, children use search systems to locate resources and receive site recommendations that might be useful for them. The call for good, reliable, child-friendly systems has been...

Misspellings in queries used to initiate online searches is an everyday occurrence. When this happens, users either rely on the search engine's ability to understand their query or they turn to spellcheckers. Spellcheckers are usually based on popular dictionaries or past query logs, leading to spelling suggestions that often better resonate with a...

As one of the largest communities that search for online resources, children are introduced to the Web at increasingly young ages [1]. However, popular search tools are not explicitly designed with children in mind nor do their retrieved results explicitly target children. Consequently, many young users struggle in completing successful searches, e...

To capitalize on the benefits associated with word embeddings, researchers working with data from domains such as medicine, sentiment analysis, or finance, have dedicated efforts to either taking advantage of popular, general-purpose embedding-learning strategies, such as Word2Vec, or developing new ones that explicitly consider domain knowledge in...

We discuss the outcomes of the 2nd Workshop of the International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender Systems (KidRec 2018), co-located with the 2018 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, which took place June 19-22 in Trondheim, Norway. The goal for this workshop was to explore research and industry efforts...

We discuss the outcomes of the 2 nd Workshop of the International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender Systems (KidRec 2018), co-located with the 2018 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, which took place June 19-22 in Trondheim, Norway. The goal for this workshop was to explore research and industry efforts...

Games play a significant role in modern society, since they affect people of all ages and all walks of life, whether it be socially or mentally, and have direct impacts on adults with autism. Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are a collection of neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by qualitative impairments in social relatedness and interactio...

We present in this manuscript a report on KidRec 2017 workshop, the first edition of the international workshop on Children & Recommender Systems, co-located with the 11th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) held in Como, Italy. While research focused on recommender systems is prolific and addresses issues pertaining to multiple domains-...

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 t...

We present the results of an initial analysis conducted on a real-life setting to quantify the effect of shilling attacks on recommender systems. We focus on both algorithm performance as well as the types of users who are most affected by these attacks.

Resources for children are abundant, but finding suitable and appropriate resources for children in our information-rich society can be challenging. Due to this abundance of information, systems to find and recommend appropriate information for children are needed. Recommender systems (RS) for children have only recently begun to be researched. Thi...