Apologies for cross-postings

CALL FOR PAPERS

The First International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR’17)
https://sites.google.com/view/cair-ws/

at SIGIR 2017, Tokyo, Japan, August 11, 2017, in collaboration with SIGdial

IMPORTANT DATES
- Submission Due: April 28, 2017
- Notification: May 30, 2017
- SIGIR 2017 Early-Bird Registration Due: May 31, 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

HOW TO SUBMIT
- Long paper: 4-6 pages
- Short paper: 2-3 pages
- Format: http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
- Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cair17

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

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

IMPORTANT DATES
- Submission Due: April 28, 2017
- Notification: May 30, 2017
- SIGIR 2017 Early-Bird Registration Due: May 31, 2017
- Workshop: August 11, 2017

PC MEMBERS (Confirmed)
- Fabio Crestani (University of Lugano)
- Jeffrey Dalton (Google)
- Ido Guy (Yahoo Research)
- Jiepu Jiang (UMass Amherst)
- Gareth Jones (Dublin City University)
- Karthik Raghunathan (MINDMELD)
- Amanda Stent (Yahoo)
- Paul Thomas (Microsoft)
- Johanne Trippas (RMIT University)
- and more to join.

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)
- Mark Sanderson (RMIT University)
- Damiano Spina (RMIT University)
- and organisers

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

--
ASSIA 2017, Kyoto, Japan, Aug 2-5, 2017.
https://goassia.github.io/assia2017/

SIGIR 2017, Tokyo, Japan, Aug 7-11, 2017.
http://sigir.org/sigir2017/