Call for Workshop Proposals

Category:

ECIR 2024 workshops provide a platform for presenting novel ideas and research results in emerging areas of information retrieval, conversational systems, recommendation systems, and/or their evaluation, in a more focused and interactive way than the conference itself.

Workshops can be either a half-day (3 hours plus break) or a full day (6 hours plus breaks). The organisers of approved workshops are expected to set up a webpage for the workshop, disseminate a call for papers, a call for participation, select reviewers, and gather reviews before selecting the final program. A camera-ready summary of the workshop should be written by the organisers to be included in the ECIR 2024 conference proceedings.

Workshops are encouraged to be as dynamic and interactive as possible and should lead to a concrete outcome, such as the publication of workshop proceedings (for example, for a better outreach, consider using publication venues that are indexed by DBLP). Organisers are also encouraged to write a summary article for the June edition of the ACM SIGIR Forum (https://sigir.org/forum) and/or the BCS IRSG Informer (https://irsg.bcs.org/informer) highlighting the main results of the workshop.

Workshops are to be onsite. At least one organiser is expected to attend and moderate the workshop throughout the day.

Topics of Interest

ECIR 2024 encourages the submission of workshops on the theory, experimentation, and practice of retrieval, recommendation, representation, management, and usage of textual, visual, audio, and multi-modal information, but proposals aligned with other topics of IR/recommendation systems are highly welcome as well.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • User aspects, including information interaction, contextualisation, personalisation, simulation, characterisation, and behaviours;
  • System and foundational aspects, including retrieval models and architectures, content analysis and classification, recommendation algorithms, query processing and ranking, efficiency and scalability;
  • Machine learning, deep learning and neural models, natural language processing, and graph models applied to information retrieval, recommender systems, and interaction;
  • Conversational search systems, focusing on natural language understanding and generation, dialogue management, multimodal interaction, and user engagement in search processes;
  • Explainability methods, addressing the transparency, interpretability, and accountability of AI-driven systems, particularly for information retrieval, recommendation, and personalisation;
  • Applications, such as web search, recommender systems, web and social media apps, professional and domain-specific search, novel interfaces to search tools, intelligent search, and conversational agents;
  • Evaluation, including new metrics and novel methods for the measurement and evaluation of retrieval systems, users, and/or applications;
  • Social and technical challenges, such as bias, ethics, fake news and hate speech, IR-focused trustworthy & explainable AI methodologies and techniques;
  • Cross-disciplinary workshops, including IR, recommendation systems and other domains such as natural language processing, machine learning, data science, or social and political sciences, are also particularly welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Workshop proposals should contain the following information:

  • Title and abstract of the workshop;
  • Motivation of the workshop and relevance to ECIR;
  • Workshop goals/objectives and overall vision, coupled with the desired outcomes;
  • Format and structure, in particular duration of the workshop (full-day or half-day workshop); the type of expected papers (e.g., full papers, demo papers, negative papers, etc.); type of presentation (e.g., oral, poster, etc.); and proceedings (e.g., online, CEUR, Journal Special Issue, etc.); planned activities and the tentative schedule of events etc.; and the resources needed to deliver the workshop (e.g., poster boards, etc.);
  • Intended audience, including number of expected participants and how they will be selected/invited;
  • List of organisers with a brief bio of each, highlighting their expertise with respect to the content of the workshop;
  • Names of potential programme committee members, invited speakers, etc;
  • Indication if the workshop is related to or follows on from another workshop; if so, please, identify which conference it was previously held at, the past attendance numbers and the achieved outcomes, and why another workshop is needed;
  • Any other relevant information to support your proposal.

Workshop proposals should be prepared using the Springer proceedings templates to be found on the Springer webpage, with a maximum length of 8 pages. All proposals must be in English and should be submitted electronically through the ECIR 2024 conference submission system (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecir2024).

Workshop proposals will be reviewed by the ECIR 2024 Workshop Committee based on the quality of their proposal, covered topics, relevance to ECIR, and the likelihood to generate discussions and attract participants. Final decisions will be made by the ECIR Workshop Co-chairs.

Important dates

Time zone: Anywhere on Earth (AoE)

  • Workshop proposals submission: September 6, 2023, 11:59 pm.
  • Notification: October 13, 2023
  • Workshops day: March 24, 2024

 

Workshop Chairs

  • Elisabeth Lex, Graz University of Technology, Austria
  • Maria Maistro, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Martin Potthast, Leipzig University and ScaDS.AI, Germany

Contact

For further information, please contact the ECIR 2024 Workshop chairs by email to ecir24-workshop@easychair.org