Italian Trulli

Introduction

SIGIR-AP is an annual ACM-sponsored conference that promotes and disseminates information retrieval research and development within the Asia-Pacific region defined as all of Asia, Australasia, and the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It is a the major international forum for the presentation of new research results, and the demonstration of new systems and techniques, in the broad field of information retrieval (IR). The main conference is a two-day event, with tutorial and workshop days before and after the main conference, as required. Other related events, such as CCIR, NTCIR, ADCS, and FIRE may also be scheduled in the days before and after the main conference.

Conferences

The proceedings of previous SIGIR-APs may be ordered from ACM, or you can go directly to ACM Digital Library for the proceedings.

  • Tokyo, Japan

    December 9th-12th, 2024

  • Beijing, China

    November 26th-29th, 2023

  • Next SIGIR-AP

    To be announced

  • ...

    ...

 

Call for Expressions of Interest

SIGIR-AP will be held in November/December in a country or region in the Asia-Pacific region outside (even year) or inside (odd year) mainland China. In 2023 SIGIR-AP (in Beijing) established an approach that included a satellite location (in Melbourne), and we anticipate that multi-location structure to continue.

Expressions of Interest are now requested from teams who are interested in hosting the next conference.

In your EoI please include information about:

(1) Indicative costing (in 2023 prices will be fine) from your preferred venue (and two if you wish to compare and contrast) venues at for your proposed three- or four--day window, covering the anticipated conference schedule (for your nominated dates):

  • First and/or last days of workshop/tutorial activities, to support (approx) 80 to 100 people across 2 or 3 rooms, with capacities ranging from 25 to 50 people in each room.
  • Two main days of conference activities, to support up to 150 in-person attendees in a single room (noting that there may also be online registrations form attendees at satellite locations with their own logistic arrangements that you would not be responsible for).

(2) Estimated AV costings (in 2023 prices will be fine) for that same configuration of rooms, covering:

  • Lecturns, if not provided.
  • Data projectors, if not provided.
  • Screens, if not provided.
  • Speaker microphone and roving microphones and sound, if not provided.
  • In-room system management costs and etc in the Plenary room.
  • Including any set-up and removal costs that might apply.
  • Video streaming to any satellite locations that might be set up, including receiving incoming zoom connections and management of them to the in-person attendees.
  • Any information in connection with required on-site technical support costs, such as daily or hourly fees for AV staff.

(3) Indicative catering costings (in 2023 prices will be fine) from the proposed venue for morning/afternoon coffees for up to 150 people across the planned conference days.

(4) Indicative per-person costings (in 2023 prices will be fine) for a reception for 150 people at the proposed conference venue or some other nearby location. Please make clear whether these costing include both food and beverages, or whether beverages would be via "individual purchase" at the bar.

(5) Indicative per-person costings for a dinner/banquet for 150 people at the proposed conference venue (or some other preferred venue in your city), including the nature of the food service (sit-down or stand up, buffet, etc) and information about the nature of any beverage services that are included in that price structure.

(6) Details (name, location, capacity) of two or three possible hotels within walking distance of the venue, at (roughly) 3-star, 4-star, and 5-star standard, including current per night room rate including breakfast (look it up on their web site, pretending to book for November).

(7) Any relevant information about yourselves: past conference organization experience or other "service" experience.

(8) [Optional] Names of three people who you would consider appointing as PC Chairs (please do NOT invite them yet), making sure that you have diverse representation across countries and gender.

Please send your EoI to Yiqun Liu (yiqunliu[at]tsinghua[dot]edu[dot]cn) and Alistair Moffat (ammoffat[at]unimelb[dot]edu[dot]au) by 31 January 2024.

Topics of Interest

The topics of interest to the SIGIR-AP community include but are not limited to the following areas

  • Search and ranking:

       Research on core IR algorithmic topics, including IR at scale, such as

    • Queries and query analysis (e.g., query intent, query understanding, query suggestion and prediction, query representation and reformulation, spoken queries).
    • Web search (e.g., ranking at web scale, link analysis, sponsored search, search advertising, adversarial search and spam, vertical search).
    • Retrieval models and ranking (e.g., ranking algorithms, learning to rank, language models, retrieval models, combining searches, diversity, aggregated search, dealing with data bias).
    • Efficiency and scalability (e.g., indexing, crawling, compression, search engine architecture, distributed search, metasearch, peer-to-peer search, search in the cloud).
    • Theoretical models and foundations of information retrieval and access (e.g., new theories, fundamental concepts, theoretical analysis).

  • Content recommendation, analysis and classification:

       Research focusing on recommender systems, rich content representations and content analysis, such as

    • Filtering and recommendation (e.g., content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, recommender systems, recommendation algorithms, zero-query and implicit search, personalized recommendation).
    • Document representation and content analysis (e.g., summarization, text representation, linguistic analysis, readability, NLP for search, cross-lingual and multilingual search, information extraction, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, clustering, classification, topic models).
    • Knowledge acquisition (e.g. information extraction, relation extraction, event extraction, query understanding, human-in-the-loop knowledge acquisition).

  • Machine learning and NLP for search and recommendation:

       Research bridging ML, NLP, and IR, such as

    • Core ML (e.g. deep learning for IR, embeddings, intelligent personal assistants and agents, unbiased learning).
    • Question answering (e.g., factoid and non-factoid question answering, interactive question answering, community-based question answering, question answering systems).
    • Conversational systems (e.g., conversational search interaction, dialog systems, spoken language interfaces, intelligent chat systems).
    • Explicit semantics (e.g. semantic search, named-entities, relation and event extraction).
    • Knowledge representation and reasoning (e.g., link prediction, knowledge graph completion, query understanding, knowledge-guided query and document representation, ontology modeling).

  • Humans and interfaces:

       Research into user-centric aspects of IR including user interfaces, behavior modeling, privacy, interactive systems, such as

    • Mining and modeling users (e.g., user and task models, click models, log analysis, behavioral analysis, modeling and simulation of information interaction, attention modeling).
    • Interactive search (e.g., search interfaces, information access, exploratory search, search context, whole-session support, proactive search, personalized search, mixed initiative systems, multi-modal systems).
    • Social search (e.g., social media search, social tagging, crowdsourcing).
    • Collaborative search (e.g., human-in-the-loop, knowledge acquisition).
    • Information security (e.g., privacy, surveillance, censorship, encryption, security).
    • User studies comparing theory to human behaviour for search and recommendation.

  • Evaluation:

       Research that focuses on the measurement and evaluation of IR systems, such as

    • User-centered evaluation (e.g., user experience and performance, user engagement, search task design).
    • System-centered evaluation (e.g., evaluation metrics, test collections, experimental design, evaluation pipelines, crowdsourcing).
    • Beyond Cranfield (e.g., online evaluation, task-based, session-based, multi-turn, interactive search).
    • Beyond labels (e.g., simulation, implicit signals, eye-tracking and physiological signals).
    • Beyond effectiveness (e.g., value, utility, usefulness, diversity, novelty, urgency, freshness, credibility, authority).
    • Methodology (e.g., statistical methods, reproducibility, dealing with data bias, new experimental approaches, metrics for metrics).

  • Fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics, and explainability (FATE) in IR:

       Research on aspects of fairness and information bias in search and recommender systems, such as

    • Fairness, accountability, transparency (e.g. confidentiality, representativeness, discrimination and harmful bias).
    • Ethics, economics, and politics (e.g., studies on broader implications, norms and ethics, economic value, political impact, social good).
    • Two-sided search and recommendation scenarios (e.g. matching users and providers, marketplaces).

  • Domain-specific applications:

       Research focusing on domain-specific IR challenges, such as

    • Local and mobile search (e.g., location-based search, mobile usage understanding, mobile result presentation, audio and touch interfaces, geographic search, location context in search).
    • Social search (e.g., social networks in search, social media in search, blog and microblog search, forum search).
    • Search in structured data (e.g., XML search, graph search, ranking in databases, desktop search, email search, entity-oriented search).
    • Multimedia search (e.g., image search, video search, speech and audio search, music search).
    • Education (e.g., search for educational support, peer matching, info seeking in online courses).
    • Legal (e.g., e-discovery, patents, other applications in law).
    • Health (e.g., medical, genomics, bioinformatics, other applications in health).
    • Knowledge graph applications (e.g. conversational search, semantic search, entity search, KB question answering, knowledge-guided NLP, search and recommendation).
    • Other applications and domains (e.g., digital libraries, enterprise, expert search, news search, app search, archival search, new retrieval problems including applications of search technology for social good).

Environmental&Social Responsibility

SIGIR-AP will make every effort to be carbon neutral. Towards this goal, in-person attendees will be encouraged to purchase carbon credits matching their transport costs, and all conference purchases will either be undertaken via approved green suppliers, or be matched by the purchase of carbon credits as part of the conference budget.

Attendance options will be permanently available for remote participation, including remote/online attendance; remote presentation of papers; and support for possible satellite venues elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region at which groups of people might gather to attend the conference.

Online attendance fees will be set at a level sufficiently low to be viable to interested people from all countries. Where even those fees would prove onerous to individuals, online attendance at the conference will be made available free of charge.

Steering Committee Chairs

 
Free Template by colorlib.com
Yiqun Liu

Professor
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University
Beijing, China

Free Template by colorlib.com
Alistair Moffat

Professor
School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne
Melbourne, Australia

Committee Members

 
Free Template by colorlib.com
Charles L. A. Clarke

Professor
Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Free Template by colorlib.com
Xuanjing Huang

Professor
Department of Computer Science, Fudan University
Shanghai, China

Free Template by colorlib.com
Hideo Joho

Associate Professor
Faculty of Library, Information and Media Science, University of Tsukuba
Tsukuba, Japan

Free Template by colorlib.com
Yoelle Maarek

Vice President of Science & Research
Alexa Shopping, Amazon
Haifa, Israel

Free Template by colorlib.com
Emine Yilmaz

Professor
Department of Computer Science, University College London
Amazon Scholar
Amazon Alexa Shopping
London, England, UK