Apologies for cross-postings


CALL FOR PAPERS


The Second International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR'18)

https://sites.google.com/view/cair-ws/cair-2018


at SIGIR 2018, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, July 12, 2018


IMPORTANT DATES

Early-Bird Submission Due: April 12, 2018

Regular Submission Due: May 4, 2018

Early-Bird Notification: May 4, 2018

SIGIR 2018 Early-Bird Registration Due: May 5, 2018

Regular Notification: May 25, 2018

Workshop: July 12, 2018


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 Second International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR'18) will again 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


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: 6 pages max.

Short paper: 4 pages max.

Format: http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cair18


Accepted full papers will be granted an optional +2 pages to address comments from the reviewers and 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

organizers. Submission must include the name and affiliations of authors.


We are having two rounds of submissions. The Early Bird Submission deadline (April 12, 2018) is for authors who wish to take advantage of the SIGIR 2018 Early Bird registration rate. Acceptance notifications will one day prior to the Early Bird registration expiration date (May 4, 2018).


Please note that papers that are not accepted during the Early Bird submission round cannot be resubmitted to the Regular submission round.



IMPORTANT DATES

Early-Bird Submission Due: April 12, 2018

Regular Submission Due: May 4, 2018

Early-Bird Notification: May 4, 2018

SIGIR 2018 Early-Bird Registration Due: May 5, 2018

Regular Notification: May 25, 2018

Workshop: July 12, 2018



PC MEMBERS

TBA

ORGANIZERS

Jaime Arguello (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Hideo Joho (University of Tsukuba)

Julia Kiseleva (University of Amsterdam)

Filip Radlinski (Google)

Damiano Spina (RMIT University)


STEERING COMMITTEE

Lawrence Cavedon (RMIT University)

Fernando Diaz (Spotify)

Dilek Hakkani-Tur (Google)

Mark Sanderson (RMIT University)

Milad Shokouhi (Microsoft)

and organisers


CONTACT

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