eCom'23: The SIGIR 2023 Workshop on eCommerce

eCommerce Information Retrieval (IR) is receiving increasing attention in the academic literature and is an essential component of some of the largest web sites (e.g. Airbnb, Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Flipkart, Lowes's, Taobao, Target). SIGIR has for several years seen sponsorship from eCommerce organizations, reflecting the importance of IR research to them. The purpose of this workshop is (1) to bring together researchers and practitioners of eCommerce IR to discuss topics unique to it, (2) to determine how to use eCommerce's unique combination of free text, structured data, and customer behavior data to improve search relevance, and (3) to examine how to build datasets and evaluate algorithms in this domain. The theme of this year's eCommerce IRworkshop is Foundation Models and Unified Information Access in eCommerce. The workshop solicits papers on this topic and includes a panel focused on this area (see Section 2). In addition, Lowe's is sponsoring an eCommerce data challenge on Cross-modal and Multi-modal Visual Search for eCommerce. The data challenge reflects themes from the successful SIGIR workshops in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. ECOM23 will be held as a full day hybrid workshop to accommodate for diverse participation.