Query performance prediction (QPP) methods have primarily been tailored to mainstream users, thus relying on the traditional concept of relevance. In the case of children, however, relevance goes beyond content-based resource-query matching, which is why we gauge the performance of existing QPP methods in estimating the fit of resources retrieved in response to child-formulated queries. Outcomes from our empirical exploration of various QPP methods using a traditional and a child-focused definition of relevance on 2 datasets reveal the limitations in the adaptability of existing methods to the context of child information retrieval.

The concept of relevance in Information Retrieval (IR) has been extensively studied. However, most mainstream IR models have been developed with adult users in mind, assuming cognitive maturity and autonomous interaction. Younger searchers, who increasingly integrate IR systems into their information-seeking practices, differ in cognitive abilities, information needs, and limited digital knowledge, which shape how they judge relevance, often diverging from traditional definitions assumed to work for adults. This calls for a deeper understanding of how this underrepresented group judges online content. In this study, we explore how children interpret and determine relevance when searching for information online in primary school classrooms. As information-seeking in this context is often guided by teachers, we also probe their criteria for relevance. By comparing both perspectives, we uncover points of alignment and divergence. These findings contribute to revisiting the concept of relevance for the primary school context and, more broadly, to the design and evaluation of equitable, context-aware IR systems that support responsible and inclusive information seeking practices.

Agents based on Large Language Models (LLM) have introduced a new way of information seeking that could simplify the search process to suit children’s cognitive skills, as these agents often respond to natural language inquiries with easy-to-read and plausible answers. Still, with emotions playing a crucial role in children’s information seeking and consumption behaviours, it is important to consider whether these agents suit children’s emotional intelligence. With that in mind, in this work, we examine the emotional undertones of LLM agent responses for children’s inquiries. Considering the known impact of prompt engineering on an agent’s response, we investigate whether explicitly informing an agent that the user is a child influences the emotions conveyed in its response. Outcomes from this empirical study reveal the limitations of LLM agents to fit children’s emotional intelligence, with agents tending to over-amplify any underlying emotion in a child’s inquiry. With our findings, we advance knowledge in the role of emotions in children’s online search and offer insights that could be used to improve children’s online information access.

Recommender systems on popular online platforms expose impressionable and easily influenced younger listeners to varied content, making it crucial to reflect on the songs children can encounter due to their interactions with recommender systems. To set a foundation, we analyze the lyrics of a catalog comprised of ∼30,000 songs to gauge their suitability to children. Our multi-perspective exploration reveals a high prevalence of inappropriate lyrics in music commonly heard by children. This highlights the need for further explorations pertaining online platforms and their recommender systems that curate and ultimately present items from catalogs such as the ones we examined, highlighting the potential negative impact of such lyrics on their behavior and personality by promoting harmful language or biases. Informed by our findings, we outline research directions for the information retrieval community to consider when designing, evaluating, and deploying algorithms that serve diverse audiences.

There is a lack of a steady and solid influx of information retrieval (IR) research that has children (as the user group) as the protagonist. Existing work is scattered, conducted by only a few research groups, and often based on small-scale user studies or data that cannot be widely shared. Moreover, much of the current research focuses on specific age ranges and abilities, neglecting the broader spectrum of children's needs. Consequently, the paucity of IR research on how search and recommender systems serve and/or ultimately affect children translates into one of many 'Low-resource environments' in IR. Drawing from the literature and our experience in this area, we highlight key challenges and encourage greater attention from the IR community to address this critical gap.

Children form stereotypes by observing stereotypical expressions during childhood, influencing their future beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. These perceptions, often negative, can surface across the many online media platforms that children access, like streaming services and social media. Given that many of the items displayed on these platforms are commonly selected by recommendation algorithms (RAs), it becomes critical to investigate their role in suggesting items that could negatively impact this vulnerable population. We address this concern by conducting an empirical evaluation to gauge the presence of Gender, Race, and Religion stereotypes among the top-10 recommendations generated by a wide range of RAs across two well-known datasets in different domains: Movielens (movies) and GoodReads (books). Results analyses reveal that all RAs frequently recommend stereotypical items. Gender stereotypes are particularly prevalent, appearing in almost every recommendation list and emerging as the most common stereotype. Our results indicate that no algorithm has a consistent tendency towards recommending more stereotypical content; instead, high stereotype presence can be found across recommendation strategies. Outcomes from this work underscore the potential risks that RAs pose to children in perpetuating and reinforcing harmful stereotypes—this prompts reflections on their implications for the design and evaluation of recommender systems

In an existing study, the InsideOut Framework is used to produce and explore the emotional profiles of search engines (SE) in response to queries formulated by children aged 9 to 11 in the classroom context, revealing the emotional diversity of SE responses. Since then, there have been significant technological advances in emotion detection and information access. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive reproducibility study where we probe today's emotional profile of SE using both a lexicon-based and a language-model based approach tailored to the Italian language, thus addressing an acknowledged limitation of the original study. Additionally, considering the prevalence of agents based on Large Language Models (LLM) as information access systems among children, we extend the analysis to capture the emotional undertones of LLM responses and juxtapose them to those of SE. Our findings emphasize the importance of leveraging the appropriate emotion detection technique to produce and explore emotional profiles and lead us to reflect on the interplay of emotions on children's search-as-learning experience.

Simulation is widely used in recommender systems research to study algorithm behavior and its impact on users. A common strategy involves adopting a universal choice model to represent users, assuming all follow the same consumption patterns. This one-size-fits-all approach overlooks the diversity in user preferences and decision-making patterns. In this work, we scrutinize whether this universal view fails to account for unique user behavior, thus harming realism and reliability of simulation outcomes. We conduct multiple simulations with various recommendation algorithms and choice models in the movie domain, comparing outcomes to users’ organic consumption patterns. Further, we evaluate whether a holistic model that captures users’ differences in behavior would better reflect a wide user base. Our findings highlight the limitations of using a naive, universal choice model and emphasize the need for more nuanced, user-specific approaches to make contributions from simulation studies more reflective of real-world effects.

Studying the interplay of children and recommender systems (RS) is ethically and practically challenging, making simulation a promising alternative for exploration. However, recent simulation approaches that aim to model natural user-RS interactions typically rely on behavioral data and assume that user preferences remain consistent over time—an assumption that may not hold for children who undergo continuous developmental changes. With that in mind, we explore the extent to which simulations based on historical data can meaningfully reflect children’s long-term consumption patterns. We do this via a simulation study using real-world data in which user behavior is modeled from observed listening preferences. Specifically, we probe whether simulation mirrors user preferences over time by comparing with organic (i.e., real) consumption patterns. Our findings offer a critical reflection on the reliability of simulation-based RS research for children and question the reliability of using behavioral assumptions to model users.

The rise of digital platforms for accessing online content-from popular search engines to social media sites- has contributed to the (un)intentional propagation of misleading information. This phenomenon, known as Information Disorder, affects individuals and society. Extensive research has been conducted to study and address Information Disorder as it pertains to the general population. Yet, little is known about how children, who have specific needs and behaviours when interacting with digital content, deal with misleading information and how the algorithms, that underlay the information access tools they use, mitigate or exacerbate the issue. Through a systematic literature review, we present research efforts that address or discuss the impact of Information Disorder on children and their overall information-seeking experience. We analyse the literature from various perspectives, including children's behaviour across platforms and the solutions developed to mitigate misleading information. Inspired by the knowledge distilled and gaps identified in our review, we discuss research directions that tackle both technological and human-centred challenges children face when dealing with misleading information, seeking to establish a foundation to mitigate the effects of Information Disorder among children.

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, these systems cannot be evaluated strictly by the overall utility of a single stakeholder, as is often the case of more mainstream recommender system applications. In this article, we focus our discussion on the challenges of multistakeholder evaluation of recommender systems. We bring attention to the different aspects involved—from the range of stakeholders involved (including but not limited to providers and consumers) to the values and specific goals of each relevant stakeholder. We discuss how to move from theoretical principles to practical implementation, providing specific use case examples. Finally, we outline open research directions for the RecSys community to explore. We aim to provide guidance to researchers and practitioners about incorporating these complex and domain-dependent issues of evaluation in the course of designing, developing, and researching applications with multistakeholder aspects.

Recommender systems research seldom considers children as a user group, and when it does, it is anchored on datasets where children are underrepresented, risking overlooking their interests, favoring those of the majority, i.e., mainstream users. Recently, Ungruh et al. demonstrated that children’s consumption patterns and preferences differ from those of mainstream users, resulting in inconsistent recommendation algorithm performance and behavior for this user group. These findings, however, are based on two datasets with a limited child user sample. We reproduce and replicate this study on a wider range of datasets in the movie, music, and book domains, uncovering interaction patterns and aspects of child-recommender interactions consistent across domains, as well as those specific to some user samples in the data. We also extend insights from the original study with popularity bias metrics, given the interpretation of results from the original study. With this reproduction and extension, we uncover consumption patterns and differences between age groups stemming from intrinsic differences between children and others, and those unique to specific datasets or domains.

Recommendation algorithms are often trained using data sources reflecting the interactions of a broad user base. As a result, the dominant preferences of the majority may overshadow those of other groups with unique interests. This is something performance analyses of recommendation algorithms typically fail to capture, prompting us to investigate how well recommendations align with preferences of the overall population but also specifically a “non-mainstream” user group: children—an audience frequently exposed to recommender systems but rarely prioritized. Using music and movie datasets, we examine the differences in genre preferences between Children and Mainstream Users. We then explore the degree to which (genre) consumption patterns of a mainstream group impact the recommendations classical algorithms offer children. Our findings highlight prominent differences in consumption patterns between Children and Mainstream Users; they also reflect that children’s recommendations are impacted by the preference of user groups with deviating consumption habits. Surprisingly, despite being under-represented, children do not necessarily receive poorer recommendations. Further, our results demonstrate that tailoring training specifically to children does not always enhance personalization for them. These findings prompt reflections and discussion on how recommender systems can better meet the needs of understudied user groups.

The way people seek, access, and use information for learning has changed. Once the primary gateway to information, search engines now share the stage with various digital/social platforms. This change is perhaps more notable among teenagers and has undoubtedly influenced how they browse and select resources to support their learning. To understand their habits and how alternatives to search engines have influenced them, in this work, we explore how high school students conduct online inquiries in the classroom. Our findings reveal that search engines are not always students’ first choice; social networks often play a leading role. This shift has important implications for the design of information retrieval technology, as researchers should consider how teenagers—an understudied population—use this range of tools. In addition, it is critical to foster search and media literacy skills among young users, who increasingly turn to tools not designed to search for information for educational purposes.

In 2011, Xavier Amatriain sounded the alarm: recommender systems research was “doing it all wrong” [1]. His critique, rooted in statistical misinterpretation and methodological shortcuts, remains as relevant today as it was then. But rather than correcting course, we added new layers of sophistication on top of the same broken foundations. This paper revisits Amatriain’s diagnosis and argues that many of the conceptual, epistemological, and infrastructural failures he identified still persist, in more subtle or systemic forms. Drawing on recent work in reproducibility, evaluation methodology, environmental impact, and participatory design, we showcase how the field’s accelerating complexity has outpaced its introspection. We highlight ongoing community-led initiatives that attempt to shift the paradigm, including workshops, evaluation frameworks, and calls for value-sensitive and participatory research. At the same time, we contend that meaningful change will require not only new metrics or better tooling, but a fundamental reframing of what recommender systems research is for, who it serves, and how knowledge is produced and validated. Our call is not just for technical reform, but for a recommender systems research agenda grounded in epistemic humility, human impact, and sustainable practice.

The Workshop on Information Retrieval for Understudied Users (IR4U2) serves as a platform to highlight information retrieval (IR) research that directly impacts often understudied user groups. The second (IR4U2) workshop focuses on a user-centred AI perspective, which is vital for informing the design, development, and assessment of information retrieval systems that thoughtfully address the diverse needs of understudied populations, ensuring genuine accessibility and inclusivity. The objectives of IR4U2 are: (1) to build community and awareness by sharing AI and IR developments that serve underrepresented user groups in this research area; (2) to identify challenges and open issues along with lessons learned and challenges inherent to this area of research; and (3) to spark discussions that establish common frameworks for future research.

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 impact efforts, our goal is to promote and facilitate research that (1) is grounded in impacts on information consumers, contextualizing these impacts in the broader landscape of positive and negative consumer experience; (2) takes a broad view of the possible means of changing or improving that impact, including non-technical interventions; and (3) uses operationalizations and strategies that are well-matched to the technical, social, ethical, legal, and other dimensions of the specific problem in question.

The AltRecsys workshop, held in conjunction with the 18th edition of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) in Bari, Italy, provides a platform for highlighting “alternative” work in recommender systems. Modeled after alt.chi and the CRAFT sessions at the FAccT conference, AltRecSys offers a space to discuss interesting, preliminary, offbeat, unexpected, and critical ideas in recommender systems that do not (yet) fit well into the kinds of publications and formats for the main conference or traditional workshops. This workshop is not a venue to showcase research advances. Instead, it is envisioned as a forum where researchers, (industry) practitioners, and other associated stakeholders can exchange ideas and together identify areas of study and new questions to expand the discussions and research agendas of the RecSys community in future years. The call for contributions and the workshop sessions are centered around the question “what are the vital questions, needs, or opportunities that the RecSys community is currently overlooking?”