The 2022 SIGIR Workshop On eCommerce


Madrid, Spain


Overview

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.

The theme of this year's workshop is Bridging IR Metrics and Business Metrics and Multi-objective Optimization.

SIGIR eCom is a full day workshop taking place on Friday, July 15, 2022 in conjunction with SIGIR 2022. SIGIR eCom'22 will be a hybrid workshop.


Keynote Speakers




Hugo Zaragoza, Amazon (Spain)

Some NLP Challenges at Amazon Books
Speaker Bio

Hugo Zaragoza is a Principal Scientist at Amazon Books. He has been researching applications of Machine Learning to Search and Natural Language Processing for over 25 years. He has taught at University of Paris, worked as a scientist at Microsoft Research, and as Senior Science Manager and Principal Scientist at Yahoo Research and Amazon. He was funding CEO of Websays, a pioneering startup in online opinion analytics.


Brian Johnson, Apple (USA)

eCommerce Search in Practice: Lessons Learned

Abstract: The theme of this talk is improving Search by Understanding Queries, Content and Users using behavioral data. Everyday millions of users are telling us what they are looking for. We need to pay attention and listen! This is Wisdom of the Crowds for Search. Examples include Query Rewriting, Language Processing, Text Annotation, Graph Walks, and User Curation.

Speaker Bio

Brian Johnson joined Apple Media Products search in 2018. He was previously Head of Knowledge at Pinterest. Brian worked on search, recommendations, structured data, and browsing at eBay, smartphones at Handspring (Treo), personalization at Excite@Home, chip design at Synopsys, and data visualization at AT&T Bell Labs. Brian received his PHD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 1993.


SIGIR eCom'22 Workshop Schedule

July 15, 2022 (All times below in CEST - GMT+2) |«Sala María Zambrano»| https://rentmultimedia.zoom.us/j/83212700398
9:00 am CEST Workshop Opening

9:05 am CEST Keynote
Some NLP Challenges at Amazon Books
Hugo Zaragoza     Amazon, Spain
10:00 am CEST Contributed Papers - Spotlight Talks

Learning to Ask Critical Questions for Assisting Product Search (Remote Presentation)
Zixuan Li, Lizi Liao and Tat-Seng Chua

10:15 am CEST Contributed Papers - Lightning Talks

Synthesized Corpora for Tagging Japanese Product Attribute Values in Low-resource Settings (Remote Presentation)
Yuki Nakayama, Koji Murakami, Erick Mendieta and Chen Zhao

Rule-Guided Knowledge-Graph based Negative Sampling for Outfit Recommendation (Remote Presentation)
Huijing Zhan, Ling Li, Xue Geng, Jie Lin and Alex Kot

Study of Encoder-Decoder Architectures for Code-Mix Search Query Translation (Remote Presentation)
Mandar Kulkarni, Soumya Chennabasavaraj and Nikesh Garera

10:30 am CEST Coffee Break
11:00 am CEST Contributed Papers - Spotlight Talks

Trends-enhanced Attention & Memory Networks for E-commerce Recommendation (Remote Presentation)
Zhi Li, Daichi Amagata, Takuya Maekawa, Kei Yonekawa, Mori Kurokawa and Takahiro Hara (Remote Presentation)

Simultaneously Improving Utility and User Experience in Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (Remote Presentation)
Phillip Lippe, Pengjie Ren, Hinda Haned, Bart Voorn and Maarten de Rijke
11:30 am CEST Contributed Papers - Lightning Talks

Vernacular Search Query Translation with Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (Remote Presentation)
Mandar Kulkarni and Nikesh Garera

Incorporating Customer Reviews in Size and Fit Recommendation systems for Fashion E-Commerce (Remote Presentation)
Oishik Chatterjee, Jaidam Ram Tej and Narendra Varma Dasararaju

Product Review Image Ranking for Fashion E-commerce (Remote Presentation)
Sangeet Jaiswal, Dhruv Patel, Sreekanth Vempati and Konduru Saiswaroop

ListBERT: Learning to Rank E-commerce products with Listwise BERT (Remote Presentation)
Lakshya Kumar and Sagnik Sarkar

11:50 am CEST Keynote
eCommerce Search in Practice: Lessons Learned
Brian Johnson    Apple, USA
12:35 pm CEST Lunch Break
1:30 pm CEST Contributed Papers - Lightning Talks

When Volatility Reigns: Learning to Rank Recommendations in Second Hand Marketplaces (In-Person Presentation)
Jose San Pedro, Jordi Esteve, Victor Codina and Sandra García

UNDR: User-Needs-Driven Ranking of Products in E-Commerce (In-Person Presentation)
Andrea Papenmeier, Daniel Hienert, Firas Sabbah, Norbert Fuhr and Dagmar Kern

Block-SCL: Blocking Matters for Supervised Contrastive Learning in Product Matching (In-Person Presentation)
Mario Almagro, David Jiménez-Cabello, Diego Ortego, Emilio Almazán and Eva Martínez García

HISS: A Novel Hybrid Inference Architecture in Embedding Based Product Sourcing using Knowledge Distillation (In-Person Presentation)
Ankith M S, Sourab Mangrulkar and Vivek Sembium

Contrastive Learning for Interactive Recommendation in Fashion (Remote Presentation)
Karin Sevegnani, Arjun Seshadri, Tian Wang, Anurag Beniwal, Julian McAuley, Alan Lu and Gerard Medioni

2:15 pm CEST Contributed Papers - Spotlight Talks

From Theory to Practice: Testing Harvesting-Based Propensity Estimators on Counterfactual Learning-To-Rank from Implicit Feedback for E-commerce Search (Remote Presentation)
Parantapa Goswami, Andrés Hoyos-Idrobo, Théo Deschamps and Nicolas Feuillet

ShopTalk: A System for Conversational Faceted Search (Remote Presentation)
Gurmeet Manku, James Lee-Thorp, Bhargav Kanagal, Joshua Ainslie, Jingchen Feng, Zach Pearson, Ebenezer Anjorin, Sudeep Gandhe, Ilya Eckstein, Jim Rosswog, Sumit Sanghai, Michael Pohl, Larry Adams and D Sivakumar

Advancing Query Rewriting in E-Commerce via Shopping Intent Learning (Remote Presentation)
Mengxiao Zhang, Yongning Wu, Raif Rustamov, Hongyu Zhu, Haoran Shi, Yuqi Wu, Lei Tang, Zuohua Zhang and Chu Wang
3:00 pm CEST Coffee Break
3:30 pm CEST Contributed Papers - Lightning Talk

Fire Dragon and Unicorn Princess Gender Stereotypes and Children’s Products in Search Engine Responses (Remote Presentation)
Amifa Raj and Michael Ekstrand
3:40 pm - 4:40 pm CEST Data Challenge Discussion & Overview
Felipe Viegas/ Farfetch

Two-Stage Approach for Predicting Fashion Compatibility (Data Challenge Winner)
Adilzhan Ismailov

Outfit Recommendation Based on Collaborative Filtering
Selman Delil, Birol Kuyumcu

4:40 pm CEST - 5:00 pm CEST Group Discussion and Closing
 

Call For Papers

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

         Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Ranking and Whole Page Relevance
  • -    Diversity in product search and recommendations
    -    Relevance models for multi-faceted entities
    -    The balance between business requirements and customer requirements (revenue vs. relevance)
    -    Ranking features and learning mechanisms (textual, image, structured data, customer behavior, reviews, ratings, social signals, etc.)
    -    Deterministic sorts (e.g. price low to high)
    -    Temporal dynamics and seasonality
  • Query Understanding
  • -    Query intent, query suggestions, and auto-completion
    -    Strategies for resolving low or zero recall queries
    -    Converting across modalities (e.g. text, structured data, images)
  • Document Understanding
  • -    Categorization and facets
    -    Reviews and sentiment analysis
  • Recommendation and Personalization
  • -    Personalization & contextualization, including the use of personal facets such as age, gender, location
    -    Blending recommendations and search results
  • Representations and Data
  • -    Semantic representation of products, queries, and customers
    -    Construction and use of knowledge graphs for eCommerce
  • IR Fundamentals for eCommerce
  • -    Cross-lingual search and machine translation
    -    Machine learning techniques for eCommerce applications
    -    Indexing and search in rapidly changing environments (e.g. auction sites)
    -    Experimentation techniques including AB testing and Multi-armed bandits
  • Other Topics
  • -    Trust and fairness in eCommerce 
    -    UX for eCommerce
    -    The role of search in trust and security for marketplaces
    -    Question answering and chat bots for 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. The workshop follows a single-blind reviewing process. We do not accept anonymized submissions. Please note that at least one of the authors of each accepted paper must register for the workshop and present the paper.

Long paper limit: 8 pages. References are not counted in the page limit.
Short paper limit: 4 pages. References are not counted in the page limit.

Submissions to SIGIR eCom should be made at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigirecom22

The deadline for paper submission is May 05, 2022 (11: 59 P.M. AoE)