Call for Papers

The annual SIGIR-AP (Asia/Pacific) conference is a new regional conference on Information Retrieval. After the 1st SIGIR-AP conference in Beijing, China, the 2nd SIGIR-AP conference (SIGIR-AP 2024) will be run as a hybrid conference from December 9th to 12th, 2024, in Tokyo, Japan. The authors of accepted papers can present their work in person or remotely at the conference.
The scope of SIGIR-AP is the same as that of SIGIR. We welcome high-quality papers with contributions related to information retrieval. There are two types of SIGIR-AP submissions: Regular submissions and SIGIR-Revise-and-Resubmit submissions.

Regular Submissions


Regular submissions are new, original contributions that have not been accepted elsewhere or simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. We also welcome submissions of Resource and Reproducibility papers. Resource papers describe new resources available to the community, including test collections, software tools, and services for information retrieval and access tasks. Reproducibility papers repeat, reproduce, generalize, and re-examine prior work, with the focus on generating new findings of established approaches akin to a test of time. We encourage authors to make as many of the resources associated with a paper publicly available.


SIGIR-Revise-and-Resubmit (SIGIR-RR) Submissions


SIGIR-RR submissions are for revised manuscripts of either full or short papers that were submitted to but not accepted by the SIGIR 2024 conference (this option is not available for other SIGIR paper tracks, e.g., perspectives, resources, or reproducibility). Authors can use this option to address the issues raised in the SIGIR 2024 reviews and revise the paper accordingly. In addition to the revised paper, the authors must attach the following information to the submitted PDF file:

  • Explanation (1-3 pages with no style requirements): a text includes the SIGIR paper ID and responses to the SIGIR reviews, explaining how the issues raised by the SIGIR reviewers have been addressed in the revised paper.
  • SIGIR submission: the original anonymized submission file to SIGIR 2024.

  • Important dates for paper submission:

    Time zone: Anywhere On Earth (AOE)
    Abstracts due: July 1st, 2024
    Paper due: July 10th, 2024
    Notification: September 23rd, 2024
    Camera-ready due: October 7th, 2024


    Submission Guidelines

    All submissions of papers must be original and have not been published or accepted elsewhere or simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.

    Submissions of regular and SIGIR-RR papers must be in English, in PDF format, in the current ACM two-column conference format. Suitable LaTeX, Word, and Overleaf templates are available from the ACM Website (use the "sigconf" proceedings template for LaTeX and the Interim Template for Word).

    We adopt a double-anonymized, single-track reviewing procedure, which allows submissions of papers commensurate with their contribution sizes (i.e., we don't have two tracks for full and short papers, respectively).

    Submissions of papers must be at least 2 pages and at most 9 pages (including figures, tables, proofs, appendixes, acknowledgments, and any content except references) in length, with unlimited pages for references. While we do not set separate submission tracks for full and short papers, the assessment of each submission will be based on whether the paper length is commensurate with its contribution. For example, a 2-page paper would be accepted if its scientific contribution is worth 2 pages. However, a 9-page paper would be considered weak if it only contains the substance of a 4-page paper.

    Submissions must be anonymous and should be submitted electronically via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=sigirap2024.


    Submission Policies:

    Anonymity and Pre-Print/ArXiv Policy:
    The review process is double-anonymized. Authors must take all reasonable steps to preserve the anonymity of their submissions. The submissions must not include any author information. The citations and discussions of authors' prior work should be anonymized or written in the third person form. It is acceptable to explicitly refer to companies or organizations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions if it does not necessarily imply the authors are affiliated with these mentioned organizations. The authors can submit to SIGIR-AP 2024 papers that have been posted to pre-print/archival platforms (e.g. arXiv), or will be posted in the future, after submission. In such cases, the authors should take reasonable actions to make the submission non-discoverable; e.g., by changing the title of the submission. SIGIR-AP follows the SIGIR 2024 Pre-Print/ArXiv Policy, and breaking anonymity or pre-print/ArXiv policy puts the submission at risk of being desk rejected.
    Anonymity of Resource papers:
    We recognize that anonymization of online resources is not always possible, and therefore ask authors to take reasonable (not onerous) actions to make the online resources anonymous. Anonymization is not needed for existing resources that are already used by the community. Authors' names should be always removed from the paper.
    Dual-submission Policy:
    Submissions must present original work that is not under review at any other peer reviewed conferences/journals. An exception is made for CIKM 2024, as its notification deadline is one week after the SIGIR-AP submission deadline. Authors of submissions that are under review at CIKM2024 must: (1) inform SIGIR-AP PC chairs about their dual submission by sending an email to sigir-ap2024pc@list.waseda.jp with subject: "SIGIR-AP CIKM Dual submission: <SIGIR-AP Submission ID>", (2) withdraw the submission from SIGIR-AP 2024 upon receiving acceptance notification of CIKM 2024.
    Desk Rejection Policy:
    Submissions that violate the anonymity policy and pre-print policy, do not adhere to formatting or length requirements, lack topical fit for SIGIR, or are determined to violate ACM’s policies on academic dishonesty, including plagiarism, author misrepresentation, falsification, etc., are subject to desk rejection by the chairs.
    Authorship Policy:
    Authors should carefully read ACM's authorship policy before submitting a paper. To identify reviewers with conflicts of interest, the full author list must be specified at abstract submission time. Changes to the author list after the abstract submission are not allowed. At least one author of each accepted paper should register for the conference and present the work, either in person or remotely, at the conference.
    ACM Publication Policy:
    By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy. Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start, and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. We are committed to improving author discoverability, ensuring proper attribution, and contributing to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.


    AUTHORS TAKE NOTE

    The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)


    TOPICS OF INTEREST

    The topics of SIGIR-AP are the same as those of SIGIR. Relevant areas include but are not limited to:

    Search and Ranking:

    Research on core IR concepts, principles, and algorithms:
    • Queries and query analysis
    • Web search
    • Retrieval model
    • Ranking model
    • Theoretical models and foundations of information retrieval and access

    System, Efficiency, and Scalability:

    Research on system aspects related to the efficiency and scalability of IR systems:
    • Efficient and scalable indexing
    • Energy efficiency and green computing for IR
    • Search engine architecture
    • Distributed search, edge IR

    Recommender Systems:

    Research on recommender systems:
    • Filtering and recommendation
    • Cross-domain recommendation
    • Novel approaches to recommendation
    • Interactive and conversational recommendation
    • Evaluation of recommender systems
    • Other theoretical models and foundations of recommender systems

    Machine Learning and NLP for IR:

    Research that bridges ML, NLP, and IR:
    • Core ML applied to IR
    • Large Language Models for IR
    • Retrieval Augmented Machine Learning
    • Question answering

    Conversational IR:

    Research on developing intelligent IR systems that support interactive conversations with users:
    • End-to-end conversational IR models and optimization
    • Modularized IR techniques (e.g., query understanding, user modeling, intent prediction, context and discourse management, reranking, and results presentation)
    • Session based search or recommendation, user engagement
    • Conversational question answering
    • Spoken language interfaces
    • Intelligent personal assistants and agents

    Humans and Interfaces:

    Research on user-centric aspects of IR, including user interfaces, behavior modeling, privacy, and interactive systems, such as:
    • Mining and modeling users
    • User simulation
    • Interactive search
    • Social search
    • Collaborative search
    • Information security
    • User studies
    • Other theoretical models and foundations of user-centric IR

    Evaluation:

    Research on the measurement and evaluation of IR systems, such as:
    • User-centered evaluation
    • System-centered evaluation
    • Beyond Cranfield
    • Beyond labels
    • Beyond effectiveness
    • Novel methodology for evaluation

    Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Ethics, and Explainability (FATE) in IR:

    Research on FATE aspects and biases in IR:
    • Fairness, accountability, transparency
    • Ethics, economics, and politics
    • Two-sided search and recommendation scenarios
    • Personal safety

    Multimodal IR:

    Research that bridges the domain of multimedia and IR, such as:
    • Multimedia search
    • Multimedia recommendation
    • Multimodal for IR

    Domain-specific Applications:

    Research on domain-specific IR problems and challenges, such as:
    • Local and mobile search
    • Social search
    • Search in structured data
    • Education
    • Legal
    • Health
    • Other applications and domains

    Other IR Topics:

    Research on any IR-related research that does not belong to any of the areas above, such as:
    • Explicit semantics
    • Knowledge acquisition
    • Knowledge representation and reasoning
    • Document representation and content analysis