As models grow more complex and societal demands for transparency increase with emerging regulations, explainability has become an increasingly important research area. However, despite its recognized relevance, progress in explainability research in information retrieval (IR) has been slower than related fields. This full day workshop aims to advance research in explainable IR by providing a more in-depth platform to reflect on recent developments and facilitate discussions across both new and persistent challenges.
Building upon the first edition of the workshop, which was a great success in bringing together multiple perspectives on explainability in IR, this second edition will focus on synthesizing a common agenda for the research community. Through a set of interactive activities, the workshop will bring together a diverse group of researchers to build a shared understanding of key tasks and challenges, and to help shape future directions for explainable IR research. The workshop will have as a concrete outcomes a roadmap document and a special issue proposal for a journal issue on explainability in IR.
Theme and Purpose
2026 Theme: Explainability Beyond the Classical IR Pipeline
This workshop series aims to address challenges of the field by providing a platform with specific interaction and engagement activities beyond what is possible in the dedicated main conference session. Building upon the momentum from the workshop’s first edition, our overall objective is to establish a shared understanding of explainability concepts, methods, and challenges specific to IR, and to outline a full research agenda to help guide future research.
The second edition of this workshop centers on the theme of Explainability Beyond the Classical IR Pipeline. This theme emerged from discussions at the inaugural workshop at SIGIR 2025, which brought together diverse perspectives and surfaced open questions around the evaluation, standardization, and deployment of explainable IR systems. Building on this foundation, the current edition aims to develop these ideas more concretely.
Thus, we have three primary goals:
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Community Building: Bring together researchers interested in XIR to foster discussions and identify key challenges in the field. This includes both established experts in the field as well as new researchers who are interested in working on XIR in the future.
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Showcase Recent Progress: Provide a platform for sharing and discussing XIR research, including work in progress and recently published studies, to increase exposure and encourage discussion on previously faced challenges in the field.
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Future of XIR: Consolidate notions and definitions, establish best practices, and identify challenges of explainability to outline a shared trajectory for future research.
Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: April 17, 2026
- Acceptance Notifications: May 21, 2026
- Workshop Date: July 24, 2026
All deadlines are 11:59 pm, Anywhere on Earth (AoE).
Contact
For any questions, you may contact the workshop organizers at catherine_s_chen@brown.edu.