Student Travel Grant

Thanks to SIGdial, a travel grant is available for a student of oral presentation. See here for the details.

Invited Speakers

We are very pleased to announce that we have two invited speakers from leading organizations as follows.

• Ron Kaplan (Amazon)
• Jason Williams (Microsoft Research)

Important Dates

We have extended our submissions to a two-round system!

• 1st Round Submission for Early Bird Registration
  • Submission Due: May 10, 2017 (Extended)
  • Notification: May 30, 2017
  • SIGIR 2017 Early-Bird Registration Due: May 31 June 5, 2017 (JST)
• 2nd Round Submission for Regular Registration
  • Submission Due: June 10, 2017 (New)
  • Notification: June 29, 2017
  • SIGIR 2017 Regular Registration Due: June 30, July 9, 2017 (JST) (Extended)
• Camera-ready copy Due: July 14, 2017
• Workshop: August 11, 2017

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 First International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR'17) will 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
• Search result diversification

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

Submission

• Long paper: 4-6 pages

Accepted long papers will have an oral presentation at the workshop.

• Short paper: 2-3 pages

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.

• Format: http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
• Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cair17

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

Organisers

• Jaime Arguello (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• Lawrence Cavedon (RMIT University)
• Hideo Joho (University of Tsukuba)
• Filip Radlinski (Google)
• Milad Shokouhi (Microsoft)

Steering Committee

• Fernando Diaz (Spotify)
• Dilek Hakkani-Tür (Google)
• Mark Sanderson (RMIT University)
• Damiano Spina (RMIT University)
• and organisers

PC Members

• Fabio Crestani (University of Lugano)
• Roi Blanco (University of A Coruña)
• Jeffrey Dalton (Google)
• Ido Guy (Yahoo Research)
• Jiepu Jiang (UMass Amherst)
• Gareth Jones (Dublin City University)
• Ben Lambert (Spotify)
• Karthik Raghunathan (MINDMELD)
• Ruihua Song (Microsoft)
• Amanda Stent (Yahoo)
• Paul Thomas (Microsoft)
• Johanne Trippas (RMIT University)

Contact

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