SIGIR 2025 Call for Participation - 13-17 July 2025, Padua, Italy

Registration at: https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/registration.html

Registration deadlines: Early registration: 20 May 2025 Regular registration: 13 June 2025 Late registration: 18 July 2025

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 48th ACM SIGIR conference, will be run as an in-person conference from July 13th to 17th, 2025 in Padua, Italy, followed by ICTIR 2025 (https://ictir2025.cs.umass.edu/) on July 18th, 2025. SIGIR 2025 will feature an extremely rich program, consisting of keynote talks, research and industry sessions, posters and demos, doctoral consortium, workshops and tutorials, and the LiveRAG challenge, not forgetting amazing social events. SIGIR 2025 features: 239 full papers, 106 short papers, 26 demos, 10 perspectives papers, 71 resource and reproducibility papers, 35 SIRIP/industry papers, 16 TOIS papers, and 10 Low Resource Environments papers, a brand new track launched at SIGIR 2025 (https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/low-resource-environments-track.html). The overall program can be found at: https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/overall-program.html. We strongly encourage you to book your hotel rooms as soon as possible! An Iron Maiden concert is scheduled in Padua for the first day of the conference (Sunday, July 13, 2025). Accommodations are expected to fill up quickly. Please see the SIGIR 2025 website for a list of hotels with conference discount (https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/recommended-hotels.html) and recommended hotels without conference discount (https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/accomodation.html). Travel information is available at: https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/how-to-get-here.html. Child Care (https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/child-care.html) Children from 0 to 12 years of age are welcomed in a specially set up room inside Padua Congress Center throughout the duration of the congress. A colorful, “warm”, safe and welcoming environment, in the same structure that hosts the congresses, a protected place where parents can leave their children, but at the same time stay in touch with them during the breaks of the different sessions.

The nursery space dedicated to the 0-3 age group, equipped with a changing table and other facilities dedicated to the little ones, is next to the kids’ area for children over 3 years old and a cinema room for screenings.

The activities are run by a company specialized in education services with expert staff, appointed by Padua Congress Center, and include thematic workshops - from painting to creative activities - as well as playtime also in the open air, in the facility's outdoor spaces. Children are also offered lunch.

The child care service will be run by operators able to speak English, German, Spanish, and Italian. Other languages might be possibile but they will require specific agreements and the actual availability of an operator able to speak that language.

The service is available to all SIGIR 2025 attendees who request it. The registration form allows you to request the childcare service and, in case, in the registration confirmation email you will receive a request for additional information about your children.

Catering service is available on demand, included in the cost of service, and it covers lunch, morning and afternoon snack, juices and water.

Lunches and snacks can be managed directly by the educators. Alternatively parents can go to the Child Area to take care of lunches and snacks directly.

Parents will be allowed to use the kitchen in the area to heat up milk or food for younger children. Two microwave ovens and a refrigerator are available in the area.

Keynotes (https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/keynote-speakers.html) Digitized Health by Ophir Frieder, Georgetown University, Washington DC (USA) The "AI revolution" is lavished with accolades and showered with concerns, including some dire warnings. Regardless, this revolution continues to shape nearly all technology and domains. We focus specifically on medical applications that rely on search or recommendation technology. Relying on these technologies, we alleviate the ever-growing shortage of medical care personnel. Specifically, patient interactions are simplified by conversational agents, medical triage is accomplished by self-administered surrogates, early-onset of mental health conditions are detected through opt-in monitoring agents, and treatment suggestions are generated and evaluated via retrieval and mining applications. These are just some examples where search and related technologies are reshaping medical practice. Currently or soon to be deployed systems are described. "In progress" efforts are likewise highlighted. While some of the described systems rely on recent technology advances, others are simply based on "bread and butter" approaches, reminding us that "new and improved" is not always needed, and at times, is overkill and needlessly costly. We conclude with some observations. Please meet AI, our dear new colleague. In other words: can scientists and machines truly cooperate? By Iryna Gurevych, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany How can AI and LLMs facilitate the work of scientists in different stages of the research process? Can technology even make scientists obsolete? The role of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) in science as the target application domain has recently been rapidly growing. This includes assessing the impact of scientific work, facilitating writing and revising manuscripts as well as intelligent support for manuscript quality assessment, peer-review and scientific discussions. The talk will illustrate such methods and models using several tasks from the scientific domain. We argue that while AI and LLMs can effectively support and augment specific steps of the research process, expert-AI collaboration may be a more promising mode for complex research tasks. BM25 and All That - A Look Back, by Stephen Robertson, Girton College, Cambridge (UK) It is 30 years since the weighting-and-ranking function BM25 was published, and more than 55 years since I started work in the field we know as information retrieval. I will be talking about my experiences as an IR researcher over the period from 1968 to the early 2000s, including the development of the probabilistic model which led to BM25, and also some of the work on IR evaluation in the years since the Cranfield experiment. More generally, I will talk about some of the ways in which the field has changed and developed over that time, and about some of the characters who helped to shape the field, including my own interactions with them.

LiveRAG Challenge (https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/live-rag-challenge.html)

The goal of the LiveRAG Challenge is to allow research teams across academia and industry to advance their RAG research and compare the performance of their solutions with other teams, on a fixed corpus (derived from the publicly available FineWeb) and a fixed open-source LLM, Falcon3-10B-Instruct.

The SIGIR 2025 LiveRAG Challenge is organized by TII (Technology Innovation Institute) with support from AI71, AWS, Pinecone, and Hugging Face. It requires an application process, after which selected teams will be awarded up to 1500 USD in AWS compute credits to train their RAG solution, and up to 750 USD in Pinecone compute credits to use/generate their RAG indices. given early access to TII's DataMorgana tool to help them generate synthetic benchmarks for training and testing.

During the Live Challenge Day, the teams will be provided with a stream of unseen questions and will have to return their answers under strict response-time constraints. Finalists will be requested to present their results at the LiveRAG workshop day to be held at the SIGIR 2025 conference, during which winners will be announced and prizes will be awarded.

Workshops (https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/attend-workshops.html) Full Day Workshops SIGIR 2025 Workshop on eCommerce (ECOM25) - https://sigir-ecom.github.io/ LLM4Eval: Large Language Model for Evaluation in IR - https://llm4eval.github.io/SIGIR2025/ Second SIGIR Workshop on Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA 2025) - https://sim4ia.org/sigir2025/ 2nd Workshop on Information Retrieval for Understudied Users (IR4U2) - Bridging User-centered AI with IR: Making Information Retrieval Accessible for All - https://ir4u2workshop.wixsite.com/ir4u2-2 International Workshop on Algorithmic Bias in Search and Recommendation (BIAS) - https://biasinrecsys.github.io/sigir2025 6th Workshop on Patent Text Mining and Semantic Technologies (PatentSemTech2025) - http://ifs.tuwien.ac.at/patentsemtech/ Workshop on Explainability in Information Retrieval - https://xirworkshop.github.io/ IR-RAG: Workshop on Information Retrieval's Role in RAG Systems - https://coda.io/@rstless-group/ir-rag-sigir25 ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2025: The Fourth Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval - https://reneuir.org/ Robust-IR @ SIGIR 2025: The First Workshop on Robust Information Retrieval - https://sigir-2025-workshop-on-robust-ir.github.io/ Half Day Workshops MANILA25: SIGIR 2025 Workshop on Information Retrieval for Climate Impact - https://sites.google.com/view/ir-for-climate-impact/home AgentIR: 2nd Workshop on Agent-based Information Retrieval - https://applied-machine-learning-lab.github.io/2nd-AgentIR-Workshop-SIGIR-20... The 1st NIP@IR Workshop on New Interaction Paradigms for Information Retrieval in the Era of Generative AI - https://hellozicky.github.io/nip-ir2025.github.io/ GENNEXT: The Next Generation of IR and Recommender Systems with Language Agents, Generative Models, and Conversational AI - https://sigirgennext.github.io/GENNEXT-SIGIR-25/ FinIR: The 2nd Workshop on Financial Information Retrieval in the Era of Generative AI - https://finir2025.github.io/

Tutorials (https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/attend-tutorials.html)

Full Day Tutorials Information Retrieval in Finance: Industry and Academic Perspectives on Innovation - https://sites.google.com/view/irfin/ Half Day Tutorials Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the LLM Era Efficient In-Memory Inverted Indexes: Theory and Practice - https://pisa-engine.github.io/sigir-2025.html R2LLMs: Retrieval and Ranking with LLMs - https://ielab.io/tutorials/r2llms.html Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning: Synthesis and Opportunities - https://retrieval-enhanced-ml.github.io/sigir-2025.html Query Understanding in LLM-based Conversational Information Seeking Navigating Large Language Models for Recommendation: From Architecture to Learning Paradigms and Deployment - https://generative-rec.github.io/tutorial-sigir25/ Theory and Toolkits for User Simulation in the Era of Generative AI: User Modeling, Synthetic Data Generation, and System Evaluation - http://usersim.ai/sigir2025-tutorial Psychological Aspects in Retrieval and Recommendation - https://github.com/aisocietylab/Psy-IR-RecSys-SIGIR25 Dynamic and Parametric Retrieval-Augmented Generation - https://sites.google.com/view/sigir2025-tutorial-dprag/home-page Fairness in Information Retrieval from an Economic Perspective - https://economic-fairness-ir.github.io/ Unveiling Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models for Trustworthy Information Access Neural Lexical Search with Learned Sparse Retrieval - https://lsr-tutorial.github.io/ Long Context vs. RAG: Strategies for Processing Long Documents in LLMs - https://sites.google.com/view/sigir25-lc-vs-rag/

Social Events (https://sigir2025.dei.unipd.it/social-events.html) Welcome Reception, Sunday July, 13, 2025 Venue: Piazza Della Frutta, Padua (https://www.padova.com/discover/QG/piazza-della-frutta) Student Event, Monday July, 14, 2025 Venue: Roman Arena, Padua (https://giardinidellarena.com/) SIGIR Social Dinner, Tuesday July, 15, 2025 Venue: Villa Contarini, Piazzola sul Brenta (https://www.villacontarini.eu/) ICTIR Social Dinner, Thursday July, 17, 2025 Venue: Caffè Pedrocchi, Padua (https://www.caffepedrocchi.it/en/)