CAIR'17: First International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval at SIGIR 2017

The First International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR'17) was held on August 11th, 2017 in Tokyo, in association with SIGIR 2017, the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. CAIR'17 brought together academic and industry researchers to present and discuss new research on conversational approaches to search, particularly over speech. As speech interfaces to devices are becoming more pervasive, and with the advent of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), investigating and designing more effective and efficient means of interacting with information sources and search engines is growing in importance. Spoken interfaces to search engines opens opportunities through the possibility of greater interactivity but also requires rethinking, e.g., how results are presented. CAIR'17 addressed a range of such issues via invited keynote presentations, research papers presented orally and via posters, and a panel discussion involving researchers from interactive IR, IR evaluation, and spoken dialogue systems.