***************************************************************************************************
Call for Papers – The Ninth Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI’25)
****************************************************************************************************

Collocated with IJCAI 2025 (Montreal, Canada) on August 16-18, 2025
https://scai.info


Important dates
• Submission deadline: May 9, 2025 (AoE)
• Author notification: June 6, 2025


Description
SCAI is an established venue that provides a discussion platform on Conversational AI for intelligent information access, bringing together researchers and practitioners across natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning and human-computer interaction fields.


The goal of Search-oriented Conversational AI is to design systems that allow for more convenient information access by means of a conversational user interface. Further development of Conversational Search systems requires closer integration and better information exchange between the diverse communities that are engaged in the areas of Dialogue Systems, Information Retrieval and Conversational User Interfaces. SCAI aims to bring together researchers interested in informing the design of a new generation of systems for conversational information access.


SCAI 2025 offers an opportunity to present ongoing or recently completed research work in an interdisciplinary meeting specifically focused on search-based conversational AI. The workshop program will include presentation of invited papers, oral presentations, and a poster session.


We encourage submission for presentation of original as well as already published papers that are relevant to the following topics:
* Design: theoretical understanding and empirical analysis of information-seeking dialogues, properties of a mixed-initiative interaction, modeling conversational contexts, relation to concurrent research in dialogue systems and conversational user interfaces
* Implementation: prototypes of conversational search systems, demonstrations and proof-of-concept implementations, as well as lessons learned from deployed systems.
* Evaluation: evaluation of conversational search systems including user studies, question answering and summarization metrics, Wizard-of-Oz experiments, user simulation for dialogues, measuring learning outcomes of an information-seeking dialogue, dialogue analysis, faithfulness and provenance of the dialogue responses.
* Applications: information-seeking dialogues for personalised education, healthcare, entertainment and knowledge-intensive work.


Submission Instructions:
* Papers should be up to 8 pages (long) or up to 4 pages (short), excluding references and supplementary materials.
* Submissions must be anonymized for double-blind review.
* The authors are encouraged (but not required to) use the IJCAI template for their submissions: https://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit.
* Our venue is non-archival and the authors retain the right to submit the same work to another venue for official publication, or submit previously published work.
* The accepted papers will be presented either orally or as posters. The decision about the presentation format will be based on reviewers’ recommendation.
* Submit your work using the on-line form: https://chairingtool.com/conferences/ijcai25-w21/main-track?role=author