SIGIR 2020 Workshop on eCommerce (SIGIR eCom)

Call For Papers
==================

SIGIR eCom is a full day workshop taking place on Thursday, July 30, 2020 in conjunction with SIGIR 2020 in Xi’an, China.

Workshop website: https://sigir-ecom.github.io/

Important Dates:
==================
- Submissions Due - June 20, 2020
- Notification - July 10, 2020
- Camera Ready Version of Papers Due - July 17, 2020
- SIGIR eCom Full day Workshop - July 30, 2020

Details:
==================
The SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce will serve as a platform for publication and discussion of Information Retrieval and NLP research & their applications in the domain of eCommerce. This workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from academia and industry to discuss the challenges and approaches to product search and recommendation in eCommerce.

We invite quality research contributions, position and opinion papers addressing relevant challenges in the domain of eCommerce.

We invite submission of papers and posters of two to ten pages (including references), representing original research, preliminary research results, proposals for new work, position and opinion papers. All submitted papers and posters will be single-blind and will be peer reviewed by an international program committee of researchers of high repute. Accepted submissions will be presented at the workshop.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
====================================
Ranking and Whole Page Relevance
- Diversity in product search and recommendations
- Relevance models for multi-faceted entities
- The balance between business requirements and customer requirements (revenue vs. relevance)
- Ranking features (textual, image, structured data, customer behavior, reviews, ratings, social signals, etc.)
- Deterministic sorts (e.g. price low to high)
- Temporal dynamics and seasonality

Query Understanding
- Query intent, query suggestions, and auto-completion
- Strategies for resolving low or zero recall queries
- Converting across modalities (e.g. text, structured data, images)

Document Understanding
- Categorization and facets
- Reviews and sentiment analysis

Recommendation and Personalization
- Personalization & contextualization, including the use of personal facets such as age, gender, location
- Blending recommendations and search results

Representations and Data
- Semantic representation of products, queries, and customers
- Construction and use of knowledge graphs for eCommerce

IR Fundamentals for eCommerce
- Cross-lingual search and machine translation
- Machine learning techniques for eCommerce applications
- Indexing and search in rapidly changing environments (e.g. auction sites)
- Experimentation techniques including AB testing and Multi-armed bandits

Other Topics
- UX for eCommerce
- The role of search in trust and security for marketplaces
- Question answering and chat bots for eCommerce

Data/ Resource Track:
==================
In order to promote academic research in the eCommerce domain, we plan to accept a small number of high quality dataset contributions. These submissions should be accompanied by a clear and detailed description of the dataset, some potential questions and applications that arise from it. Preliminary empirical investigations conveying any insight about the data will increase the quality of the submission.

Submission Instructions:
==================
All papers will be peer reviewed (single-blind) by the program committee and judged by their relevance to the workshop, especially to the main themes identified above, and their potential to generate discussion.

All submissions must be formatted according to the latest ACM SIG proceedings template available at
http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template (LaTeX users use sample-sigconf.tex as a template).

Submissions must describe work that is not previously published, not accepted for publication elsewhere, and not currently under review elsewhere. All submissions must be in English.

Please note that at least one of the authors of each accepted paper must register for the workshop and present the paper in-person.

Submissions to SIGIR eCom should be made at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigirecom20

Important Dates:
==================
- Submissions Due - June 20, 2020
- Notification - July 10, 2020
- Camera Ready Version of Papers Due - July 17, 2020
- SIGIR eCom Full day Workshop - July 30, 2020

Rakuten Data Challenge:
==================

The SIGIR eCom Data Challenge is organized by Rakuten Institute of Technology - France, a dedicated R&D organization for the Rakuten group. This challenge focuses on the topic of large-scale Multimodal Product Classification and Retrieval where the goal is to predict each product’s category as defined in the taxonomy tree given product's title, description, and image. The cataloging of product listings through taxonomy categorization is a fundamental problem for any e-commerce marketplace, with applications ranging from personalized search, recommendations to query understanding. More details available on the website.


ORGANIZERS:
==================
Dietmar Jannach University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Surya Kallumadi The Home Depot, USA
Tracy Holloway King Adobe, USA
Weihua Luo Alibaba, China
Shervin Malmasi Amazon, USA


Contact: Please direct all your queries to surya@ksu.edu for help.