A SIGIR 2025 workshop
July 17, 2025 – Padova, Italy
MANILA25 is the second workshop in the MANILA workshop series. The primary theme of the workshop series is information retrieval for climate impact. The purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue for discussing, compiling, and advancing a research agenda for information retrieval for climate impact. The IPCC Working Group II (WGII) assesses the impacts of climate change, from a world-wide to a regional view of ecosystems and biodiversity, and of people and their diverse societies, cultures and settlements. The MANILA workshop series brings together researchers, applied researchers, and practitioners in climate impact, information retrieval, natural language processing, and systematic reviews to gain a broader understanding of the information retrieval challenges faced in climate impact in general and by the IPCC Working Group II in particular. We aim to foster collaboration, discussion, and create broader awareness in the IR community of the unique challenges posed by the climate impact domain.
The MANILA workshops are focused on co-creation. They are not mini-conferences. The emphasis is on agenda setting, with stakeholders from academia, industry, governmental organizations, and NGO's. MANILA25 will focus on informing and shaping an agenda on IR for adaptation strategies. To maximize interaction, a mixture of formats will be used, with a small number of brief keynotes, lightning talks, panels, and a collaborative writing session.
The MANILA25 workshop is part of the SIGIR 2025 workshop program and will take place on July 17, 2025, 14:25-18:15 (CEST).
On location participants: Room Palladio B, floor 0.
Online participants: URL no longer available.
14:25-14:30 – Welcome and introduction
Maarten de Rijke (U. Amsterdam) [slides]
14:30-16:00 – Presentations (12+3 minutes each)
14:30: Anne Sietsma (Climate Policy Radar) – Making Sense of Global Climate Policy Using Knowledge Graphs [slides]
14:45: Joe Glesta (ClimaSens) – ClimaSens [slides]
15:00: Jingxian Wang, Barbara Pernici, Andrea Castelletti (IUSS Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pavia and Politecnico di Milano) – Leveraging Large Language Models to Classify Drought Impacts in Social Media Posts [slides]
15:15: Mustapha Adamu, Qi Zhang, Huitong Pan, Eduard Dragut, Longin Jan Latecki (Temple University) – Querying Climate Knowledge: Semantic Retrieval for Scientific Discovery [slides]
15:30: Vincent Nguyen, Willow Hallgren, Mahesh Prakash, Sarvnaz Karimi (CSIRO) – Climate Adaptation in Agriculture: Challenges in Developing and Evaluating a Question-Answering System [slides]
15:45: Alaa Al Khourdajie (Imperial College London and International Institute for Applied System Analysis) – The Role of AI in Climate Change Scientific Assessments [slides]
16:00-16:30 – Break
16:30-18:00 – Writing session
On location participants: depending on the number of participants, we will have one or more breakout groups
Online participants: please join the zoom call listed above
18:00-18:15 – Reporting back, wrap-up, next steps
Chairs of writing sessions
Maarten de Rijke
Chairs
Bart van den Hurk (IPCC Working Group II; Deltares Water Knowledge Institute)
Maarten de Rijke (ICAI; University of Amsterdam)
Flora Salim (UNSW Sydney)
Program committee
Alaa Al Khourdajie (Imperial College London; International Institute for Applied System Analysis)
Azra Alikadić (IPCC WGII TSU)
Yugdeep Bangar (IPCC WGII TSU)
Max Callaghan (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)
Renato Calzone (Ilustre Lab, Curaçao)
Getnet Demil (University of Oulu)
Lesley Frew (Old Dominion University)
Sanaa Hobeichi (UNSW Sydney)
Ana Lucic (University of Amsterdam)
Tanwi Mallick (Argonne National Laboratory)
Veruska Muccione (University Zurich)
Barbara Pernici (Politecnico di Milano)
Thilina Rajapakse (University of Amsterdam)
Harry Scells (University of Tübingen)
Anne Sietsma (Climate Policy Radar)
Damiano Spina (RMIT University)
Andrew Trotman (University of Otago)
Yangxinyu Xie (University of Pennsylvania)
Jakub Zavrel (Zeta Alpha)
Min Zhang (Tsinghua University)
A position paper with a research agenda, based on the MANILA25 workshop (December 2025)
A description of the MANILA25 workshop (May 2025)