ACM SIGIR 2018
The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

July 8-12, 2018.   Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.

Call for Short Papers

The annual SIGIR conference is the major international forum for the presentation of new research results, and the demonstration of new systems and techniques, in the broad field of information retrieval (IR). The 41st ACM SIGIR conference, to be held in Ann Arbor, U.S.A, welcomes contributions related to any aspect of information retrieval and access, including theories and foundations, algorithms and applications, and evaluation and analysis.

The conference and short paper program chairs invite those working in areas related to IR to submit original (four-page) short papers, which will be presented as posters at the conference. Short papers present original, previously unpublished work that make a novel research contribution to the field. They provide an opportunity to describe significant work in progress or research that is best communicated in an interactive or graphical format. Compared to full papers, their contribution may be narrower in scope, be applied to a narrower set of application domains, or have weaker empirical support than that expected for a full paper. Submissions likely to generate discussions in new and emerging areas are especially encouraged. We welcome submissions in all areas related to any aspect of IR, as identified in the call for full papers on the conference website (https://easychair.org/cfp/sigir2018) and repeated in the list below. Short papers will follow the same track structure as full papers and authors should choose an appropriate short paper track when submitting their paper. The paper might be switched to another track by program chairs or track chairs when it is necessary.

Submissions will be peer reviewed, and accepted submissions will be published in the conference proceedings. At least one author for each accepted submission is required to register for the conference by the early registration deadline. Furthermore, an author must be present at the conference to present the work as a poster during the poster session, where researchers can obtain direct feedback about their work from a wide audience. Accepted submissions where authors fail to register by the early deadline or cannot attend to present are subject to being withdrawn from the conference proceedings at the discretion of the chairs. A Best Short Paper Award will be awarded; nominations will be decided based on reviewer assessments on the submitted version with the Awards committee making the final decision among the nominees based on review of the camera-ready version.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original works by the authors, previously unpublished, and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. Submissions of short papers must be in English, in PDF format, and should not exceed four (4) pages in the current ACM two-column conference format (including references and figures). Suitable LaTeX and Word templates are available from the ACM Website. Short papers must describe work that is not previously published, not accepted for publication elsewhere, and not currently under review elsewhere. Submissions should not contain any author identification and should be submitted electronically via the conference submission system. The short-paper review process is double-blind. Authors are required to take all reasonable steps to preserve the anonymity of their submission. While authors can upload to institutional or other preprint repositories such as arXiv.org before reviewing is complete, we generally discourage this since it places anonymity at risk (which could result in a negative outcome of the reviewing process). Submissions which violate the pre-print policy, anonymity, length, or formatting requirements or are plagiarized are subject to desk-rejection by the chairs. Authors should carefully go through ACM’s authorship policy before submitting a paper. Authors should note that changes to the author list after the submission deadline are not allowed without permission from the PC Chairs.  At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for, attend, and present the work at the conference in order for the paper to appear in the conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library.

All short papers are to be submitted via EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigir2018 to a track named “Short Paper – <Track Name>” where <Track Name> is one of the tracks listed below that the authors feel match the content of the paper.

Important Dates (Timezone: Anywhere on Earth)

  • February 12, 2018: SIGIR Short papers due
  • April 11, 2018: SIGIR Short Paper Notifications
  • July 8 – July 12, 2018: SIGIR Conference & Workshops

SIGIR 2018 will follow a new track-based reviewing structure.  Relevant topics include, but are not limited to topics in the following six tracks:

Search and Ranking.  Research on core IR algorithmic topics, including IR at scale.

  • Queries and Query Analysis (e.g., query intent, query understanding, query suggestion and prediction, query representation and reformulation, spoken queries).
  • Web Search (e.g., ranking at Web scale, link analysis, sponsored search, search advertising, adversarial search and spam, vertical search).
  • Retrieval Models and Ranking (e.g., ranking algorithms, learning to rank, language models, retrieval models, combining searches, diversity and aggregated search).
  • Efficiency and Scalability (e.g., indexing, crawling, compression, search engine architecture, distributed search, metasearch, peer-to-peer search, search in the cloud).

Foundations and Future Directions.  Research with theoretical or empirical contributions on new technical or social aspects of IR, especially in more speculative directions or with emerging technologies.

  • Theoretical models and foundations of information retrieval and access.
  • Novel approaches to IR (e.g., as part of a vision for important future IR scenarios)
  • Ethics, Economics, and Politics (e.g., studies on ethical views and implications, economic value, political impact).
  • IR with new devices (e.g., consumer devices, wearable computing, neuroinformatics, sensors, Internet-of-Things, vehicles).

Domain-Specific Applications. Research focusing on domain-specific IR challenges.

  • Local and Mobile Search (e.g., location-based search, mobile usage understanding, mobile result presentation, audio and touch interfaces, geographic search, location context in search).
  • Social Search (e.g., social networks in search, social media in search, blog and microblog search, forum search).
  • Search in Structured Data (e.g., XML search, ranking in databases, desktop search, email search, entity-oriented search).
  • Multimedia Search (e.g., image search, video search, speech and audio search, music search).
  • Education (e.g., search for educational support, peer matching, info seeking in online courses/MOOCs).
  • Legal (e.g., e-discovery, patents, other applications in law).
  • Health (e.g., medical, genomics, bioinformatics, other applications in health).
  • Other Applications and Specialized Domains (e.g., digital libraries, enterprise, expert search, news search, app search, archival search, new retrieval problems including applications of search technology for social good).

Content Recommendation, Analysis and Classification.  Research focusing on recommender systems, rich content representations and content analysis.

  • Filtering and Recommending (e.g., content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, recommender systems, recommendation algorithms, zero-query and implicit search, personalized recommendation).
  • Document Representation and Content Analysis (e.g., summarization, text representation, linguistic analysis, readability, NLP for search applications, cross- and multi-lingual search, information extraction, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, clustering, classification, topic models).

Artificial Intelligence, Semantics, and Dialog.  Research bridging AI and IR, especially toward deep semantics and dialog with intelligent agents.

  • Question Answering (e.g., factoid and non-factoid question answering, interactive question answering, community-based question answering, question answering systems).
  • Conversational systems (e.g., conversational search interaction, dialog systems, spoken language interfaces, intelligent chat systems).
  • Semantics (e.g., semantic search, knowledge graphs)
  • AI (e.g., deep learning for IR, embeddings, intelligent personal assistants and agents)

Human factors and interfaces.   Research into user-centric aspects of IR including user interfaces, behavior modeling, privacy, interactive systems, and evaluation.

  • Mining and Modeling Search Activity (e.g., user and task models, click models, log analysis, behavioral analysis, modeling and simulation of information interaction, attention modeling).
  • Interactive Search (e.g., search interfaces, information access, exploratory search, search context, whole-session support, proactive search, personalized search).
  • Evaluation (e.g., user studies, test collections, experimental design, effectiveness measures, session-based evaluation, user engagement).
  • Searching Socially (e.g., collaborative search, social tagging, crowdsourcing)
  • Information Security (e.g., censorship, privacy, encryption, security in IR)

Committees

Short Program chairs

  • Paul Bennett, Microsoft Research
  • Min Zhang, Tsinghua University

General chairs

  • Kevyn Collins-Thompson, University of Michigan
  • Qiaozhu Mei, University of Michigan

Venue

The conference will be held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A., Sunday July 8 – Thursday July 12, 2018.

 

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to sigir2018-shortpapers@umich.edu