IWILDS’26: The 6th International Workshop on Investigating Learning during Web Search and AI-Mediated Information Access @ CIKM 2026

The emergence of conversational AI, retrieval-augmented generation and adptive recommendation systems has fundamentally reshaped how learners access, evaluate and construct knowledge from the web. Yet our understanding of how these shifts affect learning processes, and how retrieval systems should be designed to support them still remains limited.

In its sixth year, the IWILDS workshop brings together researchers from information retrieval, knowledge management, learning analytics, user modeling and educational psychology to address this gap. The workshop builds on a sustained community anchored in IR and learning sciences, returning to the ACM CIKM 2026 conference, with a sharpened focus aligned with CIKM's core interests in information retrieval, user modeling and knowledge management.

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: August 24, 2026
• Paper acceptance notification: September 23, 2026
• Workshop date: November 8, 2026

Submission Guidelines

IWILDS’26 welcomes submissions in two formats to accommodate research at any stage of completion:

• Long Papers (12-18 pages + unlimited references): Authors can choose any length within this range based on their contribution size. This flexible format is ideal for completed research and substantial work in progress.
• Short Papers (5-9 pages + unlimited references): Perfect for presenting preliminary studies, planned experiments, or emerging ideas that would benefit from community feedback

We welcome submissions covering established research, work-in-progress, datasets, study designs, and position pieces. All submissions undergo standard peer review (2–3 reviewers per paper) assessing originality, significance, and clarity. Work-in-progress and early-stage ideas are explicitly encouraged and will find a receptive audience in the workshop.

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.

List of Topics

This edition of IWILDS sharpens the workshop’s scope around three specific research questions:

1. Interaction and behavior: How do learners formulate, reformulate, and abandon queries and prompts differently across search, RAG, and conversational paradigms, and what do these behavioral differences reveal about underlying cognitive and learning processes?
2. Evaluation: What frameworks and metrics can capture learning outcomes and relevant cognitive skills, not just retrieval performance, in AI-mediated information environments, and how can these be integrated into system evaluation?
3. Data and methodology: What datasets, study designs, and methodological standards are needed to study learning-in-the-wild with contemporary AI tools, and how can the community coordinate their development?

These questions are specific, debatable, and open: they are not resolved by existing literature on IR or learning sciences, and require the combined expertise of several communities to make progress.

Committees

Program Committee

• A 15–20-member program committe will be recruited from the established IWILDS community, covering Information Retrieval, learning analytics, user modeling, and educational psychology.

Organizing Committee

• Anett Hoppe, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany
• Ran Yu, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany
• Jiqun Liu, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, USA
• Nilavra Bhattacharya, ABB Corporate Research Center, Mannheim, Germany

Publication

Proceedings shall be submitted to CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org) for online publication

Venue

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the ACM CIKM 2026 conference. The workshop venue is San Pietro in Vincoli Campus, Sapienza University of Rome, Faculty of Engineering.

https://cikm2026.diag.uniroma1.it/venues