Overview

The SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce will serve as a platform for publication and discussion of Information Retrieval, NLP and Vision research relative to 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 deadline for paper submission is May 3.2024 (11:59 P.M. AoE)

The special theme of this year's workshop is eCommerce Search in the Age of Generative AI and LLMs.

Data Challenge: The workshop also includes a data challenge in collaboration with TREC product search track, to study how end-to-end retrieval systems can be built and evaluated given a large set of products. The data challenge provides a corpus of products and a set of user intents (queries): the goal is to find the product that suits the user’s needs. [Details will be out soon.]

SIGIR eCom is a full day workshop taking place on Thursday, July 18, 2024 in conjunction with SIGIR 2024. SIGIR eCom'24 will be an in-person workshop.

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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:

• eCommerce search in the age of Generative AI and LLMs (2024 special theme)
• Ranking and Whole Page Relevance
-    Optimization for IR and business metrics
-    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
-    Foundation models in 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 in PDF formatted according to the latest CEUR single column format available at https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/template-for-submissions-to-ceur-workshop-proceedings-ceur-ws-dot-org/wqyfdgftmcfw. The short (8-page) and long (15-page) limits are extended to account for this.

For instructions and LaTeX/Overleaf/docx templates, see: https://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html#CEURART Read up to and including the “License footnote in paper PDFs” section. Please Use Emphasizing Capitalized Style for Paper Titles.

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

Submissions to SIGIR eCom should be made at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigirecom24

The deadline for paper submission is May 3, 2024 (11: 59 P.M. AoE)