Report on the SIGIR 2019 Workshop on eCommerce (ECOM19)

TL;DR

The SIGIR 2019 Workshop on eCommerce (ECOM19) focused on advancing research in product search and recommendation through discussions, data challenges, and collaboration between academia and industry.

Contribution

This report summarizes the workshop's activities, including keynotes, data challenges, and accepted research contributions in eCommerce information retrieval and NLP.

Findings

Successful data challenge on real-world eCommerce data

High level of industry-academia collaboration

Acceptance of 24 out of 38 submissions

Abstract

The SIGIR 2019 Workshop on eCommerce (ECOM19), was a full day workshop that took place on Thursday, July 25, 2019 in Paris, France. The purpose of the workshop was to serve as a platform for publication and discussion of Information Retrieval and NLP research and their applications in the domain of eCommerce. The workshop program was designed to bring together practitioners and researchers from academia and industry to discuss the challenges and approaches to product search and recommendation in the eCommerce domain. A second goal was to run a data challenge on real-world eCommerce data. The workshop drew contributions from both industry as well as academia, in total the workshop received 38 submissions, and accepted 24 (63%). There were two keynotes by invited speakers, a poster session where all the accepted submissions were presented, a panel discussion, and three short talks by invited speakers.