CALL FOR PAPERS

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CSR 2021: The 1st International Workshop on Causality in Search and Recommendation
Co-located with SIGIR 2021, Virtual Event, July 15, 2021
Homepage: https://csr21.github.io/ 
Submission: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=csr20210
For queries: csr2021-0@easychair.org 
Submission due: Apr 29, 2021 (Abstract Due), May 6, 2021 (Paper Due)

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The motivation of the workshop is to promote the research and application of Causal Analysis and Causal Modeling in Information Retrieval tasks, including but not limited to Search, Recommendation, QA, and Dialog. Causality in IR attempts to develop causal models not only to improve the ranking performance but also benefit IR systems in a broader scope of perspectives such as explainability, fairness, robustness, trustworthiness, etc. 

In a broader sense, researchers in the broader AI community have also realized the importance of advancing from correlative learning to causal learning, which aims to address a wide range of AI problems in machine learning, machine reasoning, computer vision, autonomous systems, and natural language processing tasks. As an important branch of AI research, it highlights the importance our IR/RecSys communities to advance from correlative modeling to causal modeling in various search, recommendation, QA and dialog systems. 

We welcome contributions of both technical and perspective papers. Paper should be at least 4 pages and at most 12 pages using standard ACM double column template, any page number in between 4 and 12 are welcome. Space for references is unlimited. We welcome papers from a wide range of topics, including but not limited to causal search and recommendation models, incorporating multi-modal information for causal modeling, evaluation of causal search and recommendation models, user study of causal models, as well as causal models for explainable, fair, unbiased, and robust IR. More topics are listed in the call for papers. Papers must be submitted to EasyChair by 23:59, AoE (Anywhere on Earth) on Apr 29 (Abstract) and May 6 (Fullpaper), 2021. Notifications will be sent on May 20, 2021.


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CFP

We welcome contributions of both technical and perspective papers from a wide range of topics, including but not limited to the following topics of interest:

1. New Models for Causal IR
Interventional learning/reasoning models
Counterfactual learning/reasoning models
Causal mining models
Sequential causal modeling
Theories of causal IR modeling
Novel causal priors for IR
Novel causal structures for IR
2. Causal models for Explainable IR
Causal explainable search
Causal explainable recommendation
Causal explainable question answering
Causal explainable conversational systems
Counterfactual explanations
Causal evaluation of explanations
Causal multimodal explanations
3. Causal models for Unbiased IR
Causal data debias
Causal model debias
Causal debias in search
Causal debias in recommendation
Feedback loops and echo chambers
4. Causal models for Fairness in IR
Counterfactual fairness in search
Counterfactual fairness in recommendation
Causal evaluation of fairness
Fairness-utility trade-off
5. Causal models for Robust IR
Causal anti-spam models
Causal shilling attack detection
Causal data imputation
Counterfactual fake detection
Causal sensitivity analysis of IR models
6. Multi-modality Causal Learning
Text-based causal learning
Image-based causal learning
Knowledge-enhanced causal learning
Audio/video-based causal learning
Causal learning with heterogeneous information
7. Causal Modeling for Different Applications
Causal modeling for search
Causal modeling for recommendation
Causal modeling for information extraction
Causal modeling for question answering
Causal modeling for dialog systems
8. User Behavior and Causal Models
User interaction with causal models
Causal attribution of user behaviors
Causal/counterfactual click models
Causal assumption of user behaviors


**EasyChair submission webpage**
https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=csr20210

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**Important days (All time are 23:59, AoE, Anywhere on Earth)**
Apr 29, 2021: Abstract due
May 6, 2021: Submission due
May 20, 2021: Paper notification
June 20, 2021: Camera ready submission
July 15, 2021: Workshop day

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**Organizing committee**
Yongfeng Zhang (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA)
Xu Chen (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China)
Yi Zhang (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
Xianjie Chen (Facebook Research, USA)

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Submission Guidelines:

CSR 2021 paper submissions should be at least 4 pages and at most 12 pages using standard double-column ACM SIG proceedings format, any page number in between 4 and 12 are welcome. Space for references is unlimited. Each accepted paper will have an oral presentation in a plenary session, and will also be allocated a presentation slot in a poster session to encourage discussion and follow up between authors and attendees.

CSR 2021 submissions are double-blind. All submissions and reviews will be handled electronically. Additional information about formatting and style files is available on the ACM website. Papers must be submitted to EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=csr20210 by 23:59, AoE (Anywhere on Earth) on April 29 (Abstract) and May 6 (Fullpaper), 2021.

For inquires about the workshop and submissions, please email to csr2021-0@easychair.org