Gen-IR @ SIGIR 2023: The First Workshop on Generative Information Retrieval
It addresses the potential impact of generative IR on multiple research communities and practical applications, but is incremental as it builds on existing trends and discussions.
The workshop aimed to investigate whether generative models represent a paradigm shift in information retrieval, focusing on techniques like document retrieval and grounded answer generation, and exploring applications in new domains such as recommendation systems and summarization.
Generative information retrieval (IR) has experienced substantial growth across multiple research communities (e.g., information retrieval, computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning), and has been highly visible in the popular press. Theoretical, empirical, and actual user-facing products have been released that retrieve documents (via generation) or directly generate answers given an input request. We would like to investigate whether end-to-end generative models are just another trend or, as some claim, a paradigm change for IR. This necessitates new metrics, theoretical grounding, evaluation methods, task definitions, models, user interfaces, etc. The goal of this workshop (https://coda.io/@sigir/gen-ir) is to focus on previously explored Generative IR techniques like document retrieval and direct Grounded Answer Generation, while also offering a venue for the discussion and exploration of how Generative IR can be applied to new domains like recommendation systems, summarization, etc. The format of the workshop is interactive, including roundtable and keynote sessions and tends to avoid the one-sided dialogue of a mini-conference.