About Tokyo ACM SIGIR Chapter

ACM* SIGIR** is the largest international research community in the field of information retrieval (IR) and organizes or co-organizes peer-reviewed international conferences such as SIGIR, WSDM, CIKM, JCDL, CHIIR, ICTIR, and so on. ACM has approved “Tokyo ACM SIGIR Chapter” as the first SIGIR local chapter in Japan since 27th December, 2017.

In Japan, many researchers have been actively working on IR and tackle various kinds of tasks such as information access, databases, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human computer interaction, digital libraries, knowledge management, and so on. While user’s information search behavior is one of classical IR research topics based on a “human-centric” point of view, it is getting more and more important for IR researchers to promote research topics in terms of fairness and explainability in search results as AI technology has been rapidly developing.

Tokyo ACM SIGIR Chapter aims at achieving the following goals:

  • Providing SIGIR updates with IR researchers in Japan working on various IR research topics with diverse background,
  • Holding some events closely related to international conferences organized or co-organized by SIGIR to encourage interactions between domestic and international IR research communities.

So far, we have held some events such as IR reading where we introduce state-of-the-arts published in major IR international conferences, a mentoring workshop to promote paper submission to competitive international conferences. Actually, some works submitted to the mentoring workshop have been accepted at competitive international conferences. Our activities are in the 4th term now and we try to keep improving the presence of Japan in the international IR research community.

Last but not least, we are recruiting members who agree with our aim and support our activities. We would appreciate it very much if you would join our chapter.

Thank you very much for your support for Tokyo ACM SIGIR Chapter!

November, 2023

Tokyo ACM SIGIR Chapter

Kazunari Sugiyama (Chair, Osaka Seikei University)
Emi Ishita (Vice-Chair, Kyushu University)
Makoto P. Kato (Treasurer, University of Tsukuba)

*ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
**SIGIR: Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval