ECOM'19: The SIGIR 2019 Workshop on eCommerce

eCommerce Information Retrieval is receiving increasing attention in the academic literature, and is an essential component of some of the largest web sites (such as eBay, Amazon, Airbnb, Alibaba, Taobao, Target, Facebook, Home Depot, and others). These kinds of organisations clearly value the importance of research into Information Retrieval. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners of eCommerce IR to discuss topics unique to it, to set a research agenda, to examine how to build data sets, and how evaluate algorithms for research into this fascinating topic. eCommerce IR is ripe for research and has a unique set of problems. For example, in eCommerce search there may be no hypertext links between documents (products); there is a click stream, but more importantly, there is often a buy stream. eCommerce problems are wide in scope and range from user interaction modalities through to dynamic updates of a rapidly changing collection on auction sites, and the experienceness of some products (such as Airbnb bookings). This workshop is a follow up to very successful workshops held at SIGIR 2017 and SIGIR 2018. This year we will be running a data challenge (sponsored by eBay) which will allow us to follow up on multiple aspects that were discussed in the previous workshops (in particular, deterministic rank orders and how to evaluate these).