SIGIR WORKSHOP REPORTThe SIGIR 2006 Workshop ProgramPeter AnickYahoo!
panick@yahoo-inc.com

Mounia Lalmas
Queen Mary,
University of London
mounia@dcs.qmul.ac.uk

The SIGIR workshop program aims to facilitate the development of subcommunities within thegreater SIGIR population, encourage the exploration of new areas and foster interaction withparticipants from related fields. The 2006 program achieved all these goals with a broad rangeof workshops that both reunited researchers from previous workshops (such as multilingual
information access and exploratory search) and introduced new topics (such as personal
information management and faceted search).
Nine workshops were selected out of twelve proposals submitted:
Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb 2006)
Evaluating Exploratory Search Systems (ESS 2006)
Faceted Search
Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR06)
New Directions In Multilingual Information Access
Open Source Information Retrieval (OSIR 2006)
Stylistics for Text Retrieval in Practice
XML Element Retrieval Methodology
Personal Information Management: Now that we're talking, what are we learning?

Attendance was high, with 310 registrants overall. Of these, 247 also registered for the fullconference (39% of conference attendees), while 63 participated solely in the workshop.
Individual workshop sizes ranged from 13 to 51, with a median of 33.
As in recent years, the chairs urged organizers to encourage participant interaction and to utilize
the sessions to “workshop” issues rather than simply present papers. Organizers achieved thisthrough panels, interactive brainstorming activities, demos, breakout sessions, “team” summary
presentations and post-workshop group dinners.

ACM SIGIR ForumPage n0Vol. 40 No. 2 December 2006

In the course of planning this year’s workshops, a number of questions were raised which are
likely to be of interest to future organizers. We present some of those questions and answers
below (keeping in mind that things can change).
Will ACM publish the workshop papers or will we need to arrange for publication with aseparate journal?
Copies of proceedings (in the form of a single file) need to be submitted to the conference chair
up to a month in advance for photocopying and distribution at the conference. Copyrights shouldbe held by the authors. Any subsequent publication and access to papers on the web is up to theworkshop organizers. SIGIR publishes summaries of the workshops in the Forum and all
workshop organizers are expected to submit summaries in time for the December issue.
Will attendees be able to register for the workshop without registering for SIGIR?
Yes. By default, SIGIR allows open registration up till the date of the workshop. Closedregistration or capping the number of participants is discouraged and would need permission of
the program committee in advance (prior to acceptance of the workshop proposal).
Does SIGIR allow advertising a CFP in advance of the official 'acceptance date' for workshop
proposals?
No.
What financial or administrative support does SIGIR offer to workshops?
SIGIR provides administrative support for registration, printing handouts, room and audio-visualneeds, and provision of student helpers. SIGIR provides no workshop-specific financial support.
All participants, including organizers and keynote speakers, must register. It is also arequirement that all workshop organizers actually attend the workshop.

We wish to extend our thanks to this year’s workshop organizers, program committee andexcellent local arrangements staff for their hard work, enthusiasm and flexibility which made the2006 workshop program such a success.

ACM SIGIR ForumPage n0Vol. 40 No. 2 December 2006