SCAI 2027

ECIR 2027, March, Southampton, UK

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.

Since our first workshop started back at ICTIR 2017 in Amsterdam, we have come a long way. 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 10th anniversary edition of the SCAI at SIGIR 2026, revealed a rather unexpected insight. During an interactive shared task, a seemingly simple task–finding a restaurant where the group could eat together–highlighted that real-world information needs are frequently collaborative, requiring systems to negotiate conflicting preferences, maintain shared workspace awareness, and facilitate collective decision-making. Motivated by this discovery, SCAI 2027 at ECIR explores Collaborative Conversational Search and Collective Decision-Making in a challenge-driven hands-on workshop format. Moving away from traditional paper presentation sessions, we dedicate an entire half-day block (the full afternoon) to an expanded, live search task where researchers and industry practitioners share ideas and collaboratively evaluate state-of-the-art conversational search agents in multi-user settings. To support this vision, SCAI 2027 bridges the Information Retrieval (IR) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) communities.

Organisers

  • Marcel Gohsen, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
  • Shen Dong, University of Glasgow
  • Philipp Christmann, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
  • Saber Zerhoudi, University of Passau
  • Wojciech Kusa, NASK National Research Institute
  • Svitlana Vakulenko, Vienna University of Economics and Business