SCAI 2026

SIGIR 2026, July 24, Melbourne, Australia

The Search-Oriented Conversational Artificial Intelligence workshop (SCAI) is a discussion platform on Conversational AI for intelligent information access, bringing together researchers and practitioners across natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning and human-computer interaction fields. SCAI is an established venue with a long-standing tradition of building bridges and integrating expertise from diverse research communities.

SCAI celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and we warmly invite our core research community to join us!

Since our first workshop started back at ICTIR 2017 in Amsterdam, we have come a long way. We would like to use this milestone to reflect on that journey together. With the advent of large language models, conversational AI has become a dominant paradigm for search-intensive tasks. However, despite the vast success of conversational AI, there are major shortcomings in existing solutions that offer promising opportunities for the next breakthroughs which we would like to promote further. The focus of this year’s edition is on personalization of conversational search systems, and features a dedicated session for the former TREC shared task “Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track” (iKAT) reintroduced this year at SCAI.

Alongside a panel discussion, invited presentations, and keynote talks from leading industry representatives, the workshop will include a lively poster session and a dedicated break-out session with hands-on evaluation of the top-notch conversational AI systems. We are planning a full-day workshop that is dense, highly engaging, and community-driven.

Program

We aim for a highly interactive program. Details will be released soon.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions of original and already published work. Details will be released soon.

Organisers

  • Philipp Christmann, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
  • Roxana Petcu, University of Amsterdam
  • Sneha Singhania, Max Planck Institute for Informatics
  • Mohammad Aliannejadi, University of Amsterdam
  • Marcel Gohsen, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
  • Svitlana Vakulenko, Vienna University of Economics and Business