The 3rd International Workshop on Interactive and Scalable Information Retrieval Methods for eCommerce (ISIR-eCom 2024)

Vachik S. Dave, Linsey Pang, Xiquan Cui, Chen Luo, Hamed Zamani, Lingfei Wu, George Karypis

Abstract: Over the past few years, consumer behavior has shifted from traditional in-store shopping to online shopping. For example, eCommerce sales have grown from around 5% of total US sales in 2012 to around 15.4% in year 2023. This rapid growth of eCommerce has created new challenges and vital new requirements for intelligent information retrieval systems. Which lead to the primary motivations of this workshop:(1) Since the pandemic hit, eCommerce became an important part of people's routine and they started using online shop- ping for smallest grocery items to big electronics as well as cars. With such a large assortment of products and millions of users, achieving higher scalability without losing accuracy is a leading concern for information retrieval systems for eCommerce.(2) The diverse buyers make the relevance of the results highly subjective, because relevance varies for different buyers. The most suitable and intuitive solution to this problem is to make the system interactive and provide correct relevance for different users. Hence, interactive information retrieval systems are becoming necessity in eCommerce.(3) To handle sudden change in buyers' behavior, industries adopted existing sub-optimal information retrieval techniques for various eCommerce tasks. Parallelly, they also started exploring/researching for better solutions and in dire need of help from research community.This workshop will provide a forum to discuss and learn the latest trends for interactive and scalable information retrieval approaches for eCommerce. It will provide academic and industrial researchers a platform to present their latest works, share research ideas, present and discuss various challenges, and identify the areas where further research is needed. It will foster the development of a strong research community focused on solving eCommerce-related information retrieval problems that provide superior eCommerce experience to all users.