Damiano Spina, Johanne R. Trippas, Paul Thomas, Hideo Joho, Katriina Byström, Leigh Clark, Nick Craswell, Mary Czerwinski, David Elsweiler, Alexander Frummet, Souvick Ghosh, Johannes Kiesel, Irene Lopatovska, Daniel McDuff, Selina Meyer, Ahmed Mourad, Paul Owoicho, Sachin Pathiyan Cherumanal, Daniel Russell, and Laurianne Sitbon. 2021. Report on the Future Conversations Workshop at CHIIR 2021. SIGIR Forum 55, 1, Article 6 (June 2021), 22 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3476415.3476421

Format

Before the Future Conversations workshop

Statements and responses will be collected from potential participants that are willing to discuss challenges and opportunities to advance knowledge in conversational IR.

A statement consists of about two paragraphs addressing each of the following four points:

1. Problem

   • Who is it that has a problem, or an opportunity, with conversational IR? Please tell us something about a person, group of people, or a situation. (Examples: blind users; domestic situations; hospitals; web search companies; automotive industry; speakers of minority languages.)

   • What are the problems or opportunities there? Please give as many examples and as much detail as possible – at least a paragraph. (Examples: interfacing with screen readers and other existing tools; tracking social contexts; removing touch points; managing long-form interactions; understanding attention; voice input and output for low-resource languages.)

   • Why is the problem important and timely?

2. Goal

   • What should the research community be doing to help? Please give as many examples and as much detail as possible.

3. State of the art

   • A brief (!) overview of where we’re at now, in production systems or research.

   • What do we already know? What are the one or two key resources we already have?

4. Steps

   • List any resources, collaborations, research goals, or anything else that may help along the way.

Statements can be submitted by e-mail to the organizers (damiano.spina@rmit.edu.au), who will upload them to Google Drive:

http://bit.ly/FutureConversations2021Statements

Responses to statements can be added as comments directly to the statements. You are encouraged but not required to include your name in the PDF file; if you don't, the statement or response will remain anonymous.

During the Future Conversations workshop

We will have two 2-hour virtual sessions to discuss statements and responses on human-centered challenges related to conversational IR. Participants can attend either one, or both. During the sessions participants will collaboratively contribute to the writing of the workshop report, which will be submitted to SIGIR Forum.

Statements to Discuss

http://bit.ly/FutureConversations2021Statements

• Including patient context and physicians-in-the-loop to create transparent health conversational systems (Johanne Trippas, The University of Melbourne)

• Conversational Search in the domain of cooking (Alexander Frummet, University of Regensburg)

• Arguing with Search Engines (Johannes Kiesel, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)

• Companionship Features in Intelligent Personal Assistants (Irene Lopatovska, Pratt Institute)

• Mixed-Initiative for Conversational Search (Paul Owoicho, University of Glasgow)

• Using speech in conversational search: considering people with diverse speech patterns (Leigh Clark, Swansea University)

• Future Fair Conversations (Damiano Spina, RMIT University)

• Social competence in conversational retrieval (Paul Thomas, Mary Czerwinski, Daniel McDuff, and Nick Craswell, Microsoft)