Spellchecking for Children in Web Search: a Natural Language Interface Case-study

Casey Kennington, Jerry Alan Fails, Katherine Landau Wright, Maria Soledad Pera


Abstract
Given the more widespread nature of natural language interfaces, it is increasingly important to understand who are accessing those interfaces, and how those interfaces are being used. In this paper, we explore spellchecking in the context of web search with children as the target audience. In particular, via a literature review we show that, while widely used, popular search tools are ill-designed for children. We then use spellcheckers as a case study to highlight the need for an interdisciplinary approach that brings together natural language processing, education, human-computer interaction to address a known information retrieval problem: query misspelling. We conclude that it is imperative that those for whom the interfaces are designed have a voice in the design process.
Anthology ID:
2021.hcinlp-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Bridging Human–Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Su Lin Blodgett, Michael Madaio, Brendan O'Connor, Hanna Wallach, Qian Yang
Venue:
HCINLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8–13
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.hcinlp-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Casey Kennington, Jerry Alan Fails, Katherine Landau Wright, and Maria Soledad Pera. 2021. Spellchecking for Children in Web Search: a Natural Language Interface Case-study. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Bridging Human–Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing, pages 8–13, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Spellchecking for Children in Web Search: a Natural Language Interface Case-study (Kennington et al., HCINLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.hcinlp-1.2.pdf