Call for Workshop Proposals

The annual SIGIR-AP conference is an annual ACM-sponsored international forum that promotes and disseminates information retrieval research and development within the Asia-Pacific region. The 3rd ACM SIGIR-AP conference (SIGIR-AP 2025) will be held in Xi’an, China, from December 7th to 10th, 2025. SIGIR-AP 2025 workshops will provide a platform for presenting novel ideas and emerging areas in IR, fostering a more focused and engaging environment than the conference itself. Researchers and practitioners from all areas of IR are invited to submit workshop proposals. Workshops will be on-site and in person. All workshops will require at least one organizer to attend.

Important Dates for Workshop Proposals

Time zone: Anywhere On Earth (AOE)
Proposal submission: July 1st, 2025
Proposal acceptance notification: July 15th, 2025
Workshop overview camera ready: September 26th, 2025
Individual workshop paper submission: September 30th, 2025
Tentative workshop paper acceptance notification: October 14th, 2025
Workshop day: December 10th, 2025

Topics of Interest

Workshop topics typically match those identified in the SIGIR-AP 2025 call for papers, but proposals concerned with other areas of IR are welcome. We encourage prospective workshop organizers to submit proposals for highly interactive workshops (half-day) focusing on either in-depth analysis or broad-ranging approaches to information retrieval. The format of each workshop is to be determined by the organizers. We expect workshops to contain ample time for discussion and engagement of all participants – not just those presenting papers. Workshops that foster collaboration, discussion, group problem-solving, and community-building initiatives are particularly encouraged. Workshops that only revolve around the presentation of papers in a “mini conference” format are discouraged. The organizers of approved workshops will be expected to define the workshop’s focus, gather and review submissions, and decide upon the final program content.

Organizers (including co-organizers) are strongly encouraged to write an article for the ACM SIGIR Forum summarizing the event. At least one organizer is expected to attend the entire workshop.

Submission Guidelines

Workshop proposals, in no more than 4 pages, should include the following information:

• Title
• Motivation for the workshop, its appropriateness for SIGIR, its complementarity to the main SIGIR-AP 2025 conference topics, and why it would be of interest to the IR community
• Theme and purpose of the workshop
• Planned activities and a tentative schedule of events (half-day: 90 minutes x 2)
• For each organizer, how likely they think it is that they can attend onsite
• Special requirements and how critical they are to the success of the workshop. Outline a contingency plan in case these requirements cannot be met, such as potential last-minute organizers, to ensure the workshop runs onsite
• List of organizers with a short biographical sketch of each organizer, describing relevant qualifications and experience
• Names of potential program committee (PC) members – if the workshop requires a PC (any workshop involving written papers should have a PC)
• Selection process for participants and/or presenters
• Details of the expected target audience and how the workshop will be advertised to reach them
• Related workshops (if applicable): if the workshop has been held previously at SIGIR or another conference, the organizers should indicate this and describe briefly past attendance and outcomes, and why another workshop is needed

Workshop proposals should be prepared 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).

Workshop proposals will be reviewed based on the quality of the proposal, their complementarity to the main SIGIR-AP 2025 conference topics, and the likelihood of attracting enough participants, as well as the hosting capacity of the venue. The submissions will be reviewed by a workshop selection committee, and final decisions will be made at the SIGIR-AP Program Committee meeting.

Proposals should be submitted in PDF through the EasyChair system (TBA). The organizers of accepted workshops will be invited to submit a camera-ready summary of the workshop, to be included in the SIGIR-AP 2025 conference proceedings.

Workshop Chair

• Makoto P. Kato, University of Tsukuba / National Institute of Informatics, Japan

Contact

For further information, please contact the SIGIR-AP 2025 workshop chair by email: mpkato@acm.org