CALL FOR PAPERS

The Second International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR'18)

https://sites.google.com/view/cair-ws/cair-2018

at SIGIR 2018, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, July 12, 2018

IMPORTANT DATES

• Early-Bird Submission Due: April 12, 2018
• Regular Submission Due: May 4, 2018
• Early-Bird Notification: May 4, 2018
• SIGIR 2018 Early-Bird Registration Due: May 5, 2018
• Regular Notification: May 25, 2018
• Workshop: July 12, 2018

INTRODUCTION

Recent advances in commercial conversational services that allow naturally spoken and typed interaction, particularly for well-formulated questions and commands, have increased the need for more human-centric interactions in information retrieval.  The Second International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR'18) will again bring together academic and industrial researchers to create a forum for research on conversational approaches to search. A specific focus will be on techniques that support complex and multi-turn user-machine dialogues for information access and retrieval, and multi-model interfaces for interacting with such systems. We invite submissions addressing all modalities of conversation, including speech-based, text-based, and multimodal interaction. We also welcome studies of human-human interaction (e.g., collaborative search) that can inform the design of conversational search applications, and work on evaluation of conversational approaches.

SCOPE

The workshop welcomes a broad range of studies that can contribute to the development of conversational approaches to IR. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Query understanding and search process management
  • Processing verbose natural language queries
  • Processing noisy ASR queries
  • Query intent disambiguation, clarification, confirmation
  • Query suggestion
  • Relevance feedback in conversational search
  • Voice-based search engine operations
  • Dialogue schema for conversational search
• Search result description (presentation)
  • Audio-based search result presentation and summarization
  • Conversational navigation of search results
  • Knowledge graph presentation in conversational search
  • Advertisements in audio-based search result presentation
• Ranking algorithms
  • Ad-hoc spoken search
  • Spoken search in session
• Evaluation
  • Building test collections for conversational search
  • Development of new metrics to measure effectiveness, engagement, satisfaction of conversational search
• Applications
  • Intelligent personal assistance
  • Intelligent home assistance using voice / speech oriented devices
  • Proactive search/Recommendation
  • Collaborative search
  • Hands free search (e.g., in car, kitchen)
  • Search for visually impaired users
  • Search for low literacy users
  • Integration with existing technologies

HOW TO SUBMIT

• Long paper:  6 pages max.
• Short paper: 4 pages max.
• Format: http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
• Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cair18

Accepted full papers will be granted an optional +2 pages to address comments from the reviewers and will have an oral presentation at the workshop. Short papers can include position papers and panel discussion proposals, in addition to the latest findings of your work. Accepted short papers will have a poster presentation at the workshop.

All submissions will be reviewed by the PC committee chaired by the workshop organizers. Submission must include the name and affiliations of authors.

We are having two rounds of submissions.  The Early Bird Submission deadline (April 12, 2018) is for authors who wish to take advantage of the SIGIR 2018 Early Bird registration rate.  Acceptance notifications will one day prior to the Early Bird registration expiration date (May 4, 2018).

Please note that papers that are not accepted during the Early Bird submission round cannot be resubmitted to the Regular submission round.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Early-Bird Submission Due: April 12, 2018
• Regular Submission Due: May 4, 2018
• Early-Bird Notification: May 4, 2018
• SIGIR 2018 Early-Bird Registration Due: May 5, 2018
• Regular Notification: May 25, 2018
• Workshop: July 12, 2018

PC MEMBERS

• Claudia Hauff (TU Delft)
• Gareth Jones (Dublin City University)
• Ido Guy (eBay Research)
• Imed Zitouni (Microsoft Research
• Jeffrey Dalton (University of Glasgow)
• Jiepu Jiang (UMass Amherst)
• Johanne R. Trippas (RMIT University)
• Karthik Raghunathan (MINDMELD)
• Paul Thomas (Microsoft Research)
• and more to be confirmed

ORGANIZERS

• Jaime Arguello (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• Hideo Joho (University of Tsukuba)
• Julia Kiseleva (University of Amsterdam)
• Filip Radlinski (Google)
• Damiano Spina (RMIT University)

STEERING COMMITTEE

• Lawrence Cavedon (RMIT University)
• Fernando Diaz (Spotify)
• Dilek Hakkani-Tur (Google)
• Mark Sanderson (RMIT University)
• Milad Shokouhi (Microsoft)
• and organisers

CONTACT

Please contact the workshop organisers via cair-organisers at googlegroups dot com for any enquiries.