Challenges in Evaluating Recommendations for Children
Michael D. Ekstrand. 2017. “Challenges in Evaluating Recommendations for Children”. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Children & Recommender Systems (KidRec 2017), co-located with ACM RecSys 2017.
Abstract
Recommender systems research and development cannot advance without robust evaluation strategies. While many evaluation strategies have proven effective for deploying and testing recommenders for general audiences, child-oriented recommendations pose unique challenges, and adult-oriented evaluation strategies do not necessarily translate. In this position paper, I briefly describe several of the challenges I see in evaluating recommender systems for children, how they relate to similar problems for general audiences, and why existing solutions from the recommender systems community are insufficient. Significant progress in building compelling, useful, and personalized information experiences for children will require new developments in evaluating their effectiveness.