SIGIR 2018 Workshop on eCommerce (ECOM18)

Jon Degenhardt, Pino Di Fabbrizio, Surya Kallumadi, Mohit Kumar, Yiu-Chang Lin, Andrew Trotman, Huasha Zhao

Abstract: eCommerce Information Retrieval has received little attention in the academic literature, yet it is an essential component of some of the largest web sites (such as eBay, Amazon, Airbnb, Alibaba, Taobao, Target, Facebook, and others). SIGIR has for several years seen sponsorship from these kinds of organisations, who clearly value the importance of research into Information Retrieval. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners of eCommerce IR to discuss topics unique to it, to set a research agenda, and to examine how to build datasets for research into this fascinating topic. eCommerce IR is ripe for research and has a unique set of problems. For example, in eCommerce search there may be no hypertext links between documents (products); there is a click stream, but more importantly, there is often a buy stream. eCommerce problems are wide in scope and range from user interaction modalities (the kinds of search seen in when buying are different from those of web-page search (i.e. it is not clear how shopping and buying relate to the standard web-search interaction models)) through to dynamic updates of a rapidly changing collection on auction sites, and the experienceness of some products (such as Airbnb bookings). This workshop is a follow up to the "SIGIR 2017 workshop on eCommerce (ECOM17)", which was organized at SIGIR 2017, Tokyo. In the 2018 workshop, in addition to a data challenge, we will be following up on multiple aspects that were discussed in the 2017 workshop.