The annual SIGIR-AP (Asia/Pacific) conference is a new regional conference on Information Retrieval. The 4th SIGIR-AP Conference (SIGIR-AP 2026) will be held as a hybrid conference from December 13-15, 2026, in Singapore. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their work either in person at the conference or remotely. 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 welcome the following types of submissions:

Original research papers that make new theoretical and / or empirical contributions to the field of IR that grow our scientific understanding of models, systems, metrics, and user interactions in IR to aid the development of more effective information access methods.
Resource papers that describe new resources available to the community, including test collections, software tools, and services for information retrieval and access tasks.
Reproducibility papers that repeat, reproduce, generalize, and re-examine prior work, with the focus on generating new findings of established approaches akin to a test of time.
Industry papers that describe IR systems in practice, open problems and challenges in industry, and challenges and best practices for taking research to production.
Perspective papers that describe original ideas and research visions for new or open problems in IR, or provide novel and critical perspectives on existing IR research.

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, short, resource, reproducibility, and perspective papers that were submitted to but not accepted by the SIGIR 2026 conference. Authors can use this option to address the issues raised in the SIGIR 2026 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 including 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 2026.

Authors take note: It is up to the authors to decide if they want to resubmit their paper (that was previously submitted to SIGIR but not accepted) as a SIGIR-RR submission or as a regular submission. Both are allowed. We anticipate that papers going through the SIGIR-RR process will have a higher chance of being accepted if the issues in the SIGIR reviews are fixed compared to a resubmission via the regular submission process. This might, of course, vary on a case-by-case basis. We encourage authors to use their best judgment to decide which path may be more appropriate for their specific submission.

In cases of resource papers, please be aware that the review process for SIGIR 2026 was single-blind, while for SIGIR-AP 2026 it is double-blind. Please ensure that your SIGIR-RR submission is adequately anonymized (including both the manuscript and the responses to the SIGIR reviews).

Please compress the explanation along with the original anonymized submission file into a zip archive and upload it as the supplementary material on a submission system.

Recent changes to the rules:

Papers rejected from ICTIR are also encouraged to submit to the SIGIR Revise-and-Resubmit (R&R) track.
Authors of rejected papers may update their author list.

For clarity, the original reviews from ICTIR and SIGIR will be provided to reviewers for consideration during the evaluation of the revised submission.

Important Dates for Paper Submissions

Time zone: Anywhere On Earth (AOE)
Abstracts due: July 8th, 2026
Paper due: July 15th, 2026
Notification: September 23rd, 2026
Camera-ready due: October 14th, 2026

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 do not 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 a submission system.

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 organizations. The authors can submit to SIGIR-AP 2026 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 2026 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, we 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 always be removed from the paper.

Anonymity of Industry Papers: We recognize that full anonymization of industry papers is not always possible, especially if the paper is about systems / platforms / resources that make it easy to identify the institution. Therefore, we ask authors to take reasonable (not onerous) actions to make the papers anonymized. It is acceptable to explicitly refer to companies or organizations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions. Authors' names should always be removed from the paper.

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 Research 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.

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 algorithmic topics, such as:

Queries and query analysis.
Web search.
Retrieval models and ranking.
Theoretical models and foundations of information retrieval and access.

System, Efficiency and Scalability:

Research on search system aspects that relate to the efficiency of the system and/or its scalability, such as:

Efficient and scalable indexing, crawling, compression, search, and more.
Energy efficiency and green computing for IR.
Search engine architecture, distributed search, metasearch, peer-to-peer search, search in the cloud, edge IR.

Recommender Systems:

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

Filtering and recommendation.
Cross-domain recommendation, socially-aware and context-aware recommender systems, multi-stakeholder recommendations.
Novel approaches to recommendation, including voice, VR/AR, etc.
Other theoretical models and foundations of recommender systems.

Machine Learning for IR:

Research bridging ML and IR, such as:

Deep learning for IR.
Reinforcement learning for IR.
Generative IR.
Click models and learning from interactions.
New classification and clustering methods for IR.

Natural Language Processing for IR:

Research bridging NLP and IR, such as:

Representation learning for IR.
Large Language Models for IR.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
Question Answering.

Conversational or Agentic IR:

Research focusing on developing intelligent IR systems that can understand and respond to users' natural language queries and provide relevant information or recommendations through interactive conversations:

End-to-end conversational IR models and optimization.
Session based search or recommendation, user engagement.
Conversational question answer, conversational IR for tasks, dialog systems, spoken language interfaces, intelligent chat systems.
Intelligent personal assistants and agents.

Humans and Interfaces:

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

User studies, qualitative and quantitative.
User interfaces and visualization.
Social and collaborative search.
User modeling.

Datasets, Benchmarks, and Evaluations for IR:

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

Benchmarks and test collections.
User-centered evaluation.
New methods for building data sets.
Online evaluation.
Session-based evaluation.
Simulation for evaluation.
Metrics.
Evaluation methodology.

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

Research on aspects of FATE and bias in search systems and related applications:

Fairness, accountability, transparency and explainability.
Ethics, economics, and politics.

Multi Modal IR:

Theoretical, algorithmic or novel practical solutions addressing problems across the domain of multimedia and IR, such as:

Multimedia search and retrieval (e.g., image search, video search, speech and audio search, music search).
Maps and spatial search.

Domain-Specific IR Applications:

Research focusing on domain-specific IR challenges, such as:

Local and mobile search.
Social search.
Search in structured data.
Education.
Legal.
Health.
Other applications and domains.

Camera-Ready Policy on Title and Authorship Changes

Title Changes: Authors may revise the title of their paper, provided the modifications do not substantially alter the original submission. In particular, if the submission title differs from the corresponding arXiv version for anonymity purposes, authors may adjust the title in the camera-ready version to align with the arXiv record.
Authorship Changes: Changes to the author list are strictly prohibited. This includes adding, removing, or reordering authors.

ACM Author Page Charges

ACM has recently introduced a new publishing model that applies to all 2026 ACM conferences. Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 1,800 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 70-75%). Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM. Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy for 2026 to ease the transition and allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will offer:

$250 APC for ACM/SIG members
$350 for non-members

This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period. This temporary subsidized pricing will apply to all conferences scheduled for 2026.

Program Co-Chairs

Craig Macdonald, University of Glasgow, UK
Lizi Liao, Singapore Management University, Singapore
Makoto P. Kato, University of Tsukuba / National Institute of Informatics, Japan

Call for Papers