Workshop date and time: Sunday September 26th, 2021 1500-1900 CET (9:00 - 1:00PM EDT)
Paper Notification date is now September 1st, 2021
Apr 16, 2021: The Call for Papers has been published.
Mar 24, 2021: PodRecs has been accepted as a Workshop at RecSys 2021!
Podcasts continue to enjoy impressive growth in both creation and listenership. As of Feb 2021 the podcast website Listen Notes reports over 1.9M podcast shows available through public RSS feeds - this figure is more than double the figure from just one year earlier. One of the top podcasts in the world, The Daily by The New York Times, is downloaded over 4 million times per day, double the rate reported a year ago when they also announced they had been downloaded 1 billion times since their launch in 2017. Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2020 Report estimates that 37% of the US population had listened to a podcast in the last month, a significant increase from the 32% estimated in their 2019 report. A similar statistic from 2018 indicated that 28% of Europeans had listened to a podcast in the last month. While it is hard to gather more recent statistics for the European Union countries, there are indications that podcast consumption is growing rapidly across European countries in diverse languages as well.
In addition, the recent rise of audio social media apps such as Clubhouse and Twitter’s Spaces has created a new momentum towards spoken word content. This movement can contribute to the growth of podcasts both in the number of audience and emerging creators as well as introducing new challenges to the field. Millions of discussion rooms happening simultaneously require improved moderation, search and recommendation solutions that could be conducted in real-time.
While there is established interest in the development of recommender systems for podcasts and other spoken word content, there is a lack of methods focusing on the challenges and opportunities associated with the recommendation of podcasts. The PodRecs: Workshop on Podcast Recommendations at RecSys 2020 sought to bring together members of the RecSys community with groups interested in the creation and delivery of podcasts. The programme included a keynote by Jordan Wirfs-Brock, contributed research papers and an interactive audience participation activity. The workshop attracted around 200 registrants, and saw a total attendance of around 80 on the day of the workshop. As the first workshop on podcast recommendations at RecSys, it succeeded in surfacing novel research and starting to build a community around podcast-related topics, especially as they relate to recommendations.
Outside of RecSys, the last year has seen increased research interest in this field, including the release of the Spotify Podcast Dataset in conjunction with NIST TREC, as well as the NLP4MusA Workshop at the ISMIR conference. In particular, the Spotify Podcast Dataset has made a large collection of podcasts and their associated transcripts available to the research community. The associated task podcast search and summarisation task at TREC 2020 attracted over 100 registrations, indicating a significant research interest in podcast technologies. Several papers at last year’s PodRecs Workshop were also based on the Spotify Podcast Dataset.
The Second PodRecs Workshop for Podcast Recommendations will be held in conjunction with RecSys 2021. This workshop will build off the success of last year’s workshop, and will seek to further develop the community of researchers and practitioners interested in the recommendation of podcasts. The programme will again include reviewed papers, a keynote, and an interactive activity for workshop attendees. Given the increasing cultural relevance, research interest, and interesting recommendation problems in podcasts and spoken word content, we believe that this year’s PodRecs workshop will be even more successful than last year’s.