We invite the submission of original works that are related -- but are not limited to -- the topics below.

Topics of interests:

• Passage and document representation for open-domain QA

• Attention mechanism for passage retrieval

• Self-attention for passage and document retrieval

• Passage and document retrieval based on unsupervised approaches

• Passage and document ranking for open-domain QA

• Reinforcement learning for passage retrieval

• Passage and document retrieval using language models

• Graph neural network for passage retrieval

• Graph-based approaches using kernels

• Ensemble approach for passage retrieval

• Semantic understanding of passage and document content

• Entity detection in questions and passages for context retrieval

• Probabilistic graphical models

• Parameterizations of specific passage retrieval systems for open-domain QA

• Impact of passage retrieval performance on overall open-domain QA performance

• Evaluation measures for assessing passage retrieval for open-domain QA

Submission:

We invite two types of submissions, including original research papers (6-8 pages) as well as position papers (2-4 pages). Submissions must be formatted according to the CIKM 2021 conference submissions formatting guidelines. All papers will be peer-reviewed and assessed by the program committee based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, clarity, and reproducibility. Participants should publish their source codes and include a link to their repository in the submitted papers. All the papers are required to be submitted via the EasyChair system.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop, in order to present the paper. For further instructions please refer to the CIKM 2021 page.

Important dates:

• July 31, 2021: Paper submission

• August 15, 2021: Paper acceptance notification

• Workshop dates will be flexible

Contact:

Dr. Rafika Boutalbi, Analytic computing, IPVS, University of Stuttgart