CALL FOR PAPERS

Please join us at IR4U2, co-located with the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), which will take place 24th-28th March 2024 in Glasgow, Scotland

Information Retrieval (IR) remains an active, fast-paced area of research. Nevertheless, most advancements in this domain have primarily favored what we might term 'conventional' users, such as English-speaking adults.

We envision IR4U2 as a forum to spotlight efforts that, while sparse, consider diverse, and often understudied, user groups when designing, developing, assessing, and deploying the IR technologies that directly impact them.

Among these groups, we find, for example, older adults, young children and adolescents, individuals afflicted by mental health disorders, users with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), individuals with intellectual disabilities, or those with specific learning needs.

We aim to

1. Raise awareness about ongoing efforts focused on IR technologies designed for and used by often understudied user groups;

2. Identify challenges and open issues impacting this area of research;

3. Ignite discussions to identify common frameworks for future research; 

4. Outline a general approach to facilitate research endeavors driven by and at the service of specific user groups.

5. Cross-fertilization and community-building by sharing lessons learned gathered from research catering to different audiences by researchers and (industry) practitioners across various disciplines.

IR4U2 will be a highly participatory, full-day, in-person workshop. This will involve informal interactions, facilitated group work, and brief presentations of accepted contributions. These contributions will help construct a snapshot of the current works in this area.

Topics of interest include:

• User modeling to enable IR and recommendation technologies tailored to understudied populations. 

• Data collection and benchmark development of IR catering to understudied populations.

• IR applications targeting understudied populations. 

• UI/UX for search, recommender, and question-answering systems for understudied populations.

• IR-related technology (clustering, classification, text processing, text complexity) and their impact on understudied populations.

• Different perspectives of evaluation.

• Design of the user interaction with IR systems.

• Ethical issues associated with IR technologies for understudied users; e.g., their right to be represented, acknowledged, have access, and be served by existing and to-be-developed systems.

This is not an exhaustive list, as we are also interested in contributions discussing challenges inherent to designing IR technology at the service of understudied user groups–from the need for multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder collaborations to how to build datasets.

Submissions

Peer reviewed contributions. These include research papers presenting empirical explorations, user studies, and/or new algorithms related to the open problems listed in topics of interest, as well as position/vision contributions discussing uses cases, challenges, and future research directions. These contributions should be submitted on EasyChair (https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=ir4u2) at least 4 pages, but up to 12 (excluding references). Papers should be formatted in CEURART’s single-column template: https://ceurws.wordpress.com/2020/03/31/ceurws-publishes-ceurart-paper-style/, which is also available as an Overleaf template: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/template-for-submissions-to-ceur-workshop-proceedings-ceur-ws-dot-org/wqyfdgftmcfw.Accepted contributions will be presented at the workshop and published in workshop proceedings.

Editorially-reviewed contributions. To enable potential attendees to articulate their views on the topics of the workshop, share already-published works, bring awareness to ongoing European projects in this area, etc., we ask the submission of a short extended abstract. This type of informal submission -via this form: https://bit.ly/IR4U2 will be editorially reviewed by workshop organizers to gauge fit as well as themes of interest for group discussions. Accepted contributions will be presented at the workshop, but not published in the proceedings.

​

At least one author of each accepted paper must register and attend the workshop.

Please feel free to reach out to the ir4u2.research@gmail.com with questions.