SIGIR 2018 Workshop on eCommerce

Call For Papers

SIGIR eCom is a full day workshop taking place on Thursday, July 12, 2018 in conjunction with SIGIR 2018 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Workshop website: https://sigir-ecom.github.io/

Important Dates:

Submissions Due - May 4, 2018
Notification - May 25, 2018
Camera Ready Version of Papers Due - June 8, 2018
SIGIR eCom Full day Workshop - July 12, 2018

The SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce will serve as a platform for publication and discussion of Information Retrieval and NLP research & their applications in the domain of eCommerce. This workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from academia and industry to discuss the challenges and approaches to product search and recommendation in eCommerce.

We invite quality research contributions, position and opinion papers addressing relevant challenges in the domain of eCommerce.

We invite submission of papers and posters of two to ten pages (including references), representing original research, preliminary research results, proposals for new work, position and opinion papers. All submitted papers and posters will be single-blind and will be peer reviewed by an international program committee of researchers of high repute. Accepted submissions will be presented at the workshop.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Machine learning techniques such as online learning and deep learning for eCommerce applications
* Semantic representation for users, products and services & Semantic understanding of queries
* Structured data and faceted search, converting unstructured data to its structured form
* The use of domain specific facets in search and other IR tasks, and how those facets are chosen
* Temporal dynamics for Search and Recommendation
* Models for relevance and ranking for multi-faceted entities
* Deterministic (and other) sorting of results lists (e.g. price low to high including postage)
* Personalized search and recommendations
* Inventory display issues (for example: legal, ethical, and spam)
* Cold start issues
* Personalization and the use of personal facets such as age, gender, location etc.
* Indexing and search in a rapidly changing environment (for example, an auction site)
* Scalability
* Diversity in product search and recommendations
* Session aware and session oriented search and recommendation
* Inventory display issues (for example: legal, ethical, and spam)
* Cold start issues
* Personalization and the use of personal facets such as age, gender, location etc.
* Indexing efficiency incorporating structured product data and catalog information
* Indexing and search in a rapidly changing environment (for example, an auction site)
* Scalability
* Diversity in product search and recommendations
* Strategies for resolving extremely low (or no) recall queries
* Query intent
* Semantic understanding of queries
* The use of external features such as reviews and ratings in ranking
* User interfaces and personalization
* Reviews and sentiment analysis
* The use of social signals in ranking and beyond
* The balance between business requirements and user requirements (revenue vs relevance)
* Trust
* Live experimentation
* Desktop and mobile issues
* Question and answering, chatbots for eCommerce
* Fashion eCommerce

Data/ Resource Track:

In order to promote academic research in the eCommerce domain, we plan to accept a small number of high quality dataset contributions. These submissions should be accompanied by a clear and detailed description of the dataset, some potential questions and applications that arise from it. Preliminary empirical investigations conveying any insight about the data will increase the quality of the submission.

Submission Instructions:

All papers will be peer reviewed (single-blind) by the program committee and judged by their relevance to the workshop, especially to the main themes identified above, and their potential to generate discussion.

All submissions must be formatted according to the latest ACM SIG proceedings template available at
http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template (LaTeX users use sample-sigconf.tex as a template).

Submissions must describe work that is not previously published, not accepted for publication elsewhere, and not currently under review elsewhere. All submissions must be in English.

Please note that at least one of the authors of each accepted paper must register for the workshop and present the paper in-person.

Submissions to SIGIR eCom should be made at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecom18

The deadline for paper submission is May 4, 2018

ORGANIZERS:

Jon Degenhardt eBay inc., USA
Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio Rakuten, USA
Surya Kallumadi Kansas State University, USA
Andrew Trotman University of Otago, NZ
Yiu-Chang Lin Rakuten, USA
Mohit Kumar Flipkart, India
Huasha Zhao Alibaba, USA

Contact: Please direct all your queries to surya@ksu.edu for help.