We solicit submission of papers of two to six pages, representing reports of original research, preliminary research results, proposals for new work, descriptions of neural network based toolkits tailored for IR, and position papers. Papers presented at the workshop will be required to be uploaded to arXiv.org but will be considered non-archival, and may be submitted elsewhere (modified or not), although the workshop site will maintain a link to the arXiv versions. This makes the workshop a forum for the presentation and discussion of current work, without preventing the work from being published elsewhere.

We are interested in submissions relevant to the following main themes:

The application of neural network models in IR tasks, including but not limited to:
Full text document retrieval, passage retrieval, question answering

Web search, searching social media, distributed information retrieval, entity ranking

Learning to rank combined with neural network based representation learning

User and task modelling, personalized search, diversity

Query formulation assistance, query recommendation, conversational search

Multimedia retrieval

Fundamental modelling challenges faced in such applications, including but not limited to:

Learning dense representations for long documents

Dealing with rare queries and rare words

Modelling text at different granularities (character, word, passage, document)

Compositionality of vector representations

Jointly modelling queries, documents, entities and other structured/knowledge data

Best practices for research and development in the area, dealing with concerns such as:

Finding sufficient publicly-available training data

Baselines, test data, avoiding overfitting

Neural network toolkits

Real-world use cases, deployment at scale

All papers will be peer reviewed (single-blind) by the program committee and judged by their relevance to the workshop, especially to the main themes identified above, and their potential to generate discussion. All submissions must be formatted according to the ACM SIG proceedings template. The key dates and the site for submissions are provided at the top of this page. Please note that at least one of the authors of each accepted paper must register for the workshop and present the paper in-person.