Call for Papers: ProActLLM @ CIKM 2025

[Shubham Chatterjee]

Apologies in advance if you received multiple copies of this email.

Call for Papers: ProActLLM 2025

Proactive Conversational Information Seeking with Large Language Models

Workshop at CIKM 2025 | November 14, 2025 | COEX, Seoul, Korea

Website: https://proactllm.github.io/

Contact: shubham.c...@mst.edu, xi....@sheffield.ac.uk 

From Reactive to Proactive: The Next Frontier in Conversational AI

What if your AI assistant could anticipate your information needs before you even ask? What if it could guide you toward insights you didn't know you were looking for?

ProActLLM explores the cutting-edge transition from reactive Q&A systems to proactive conversational assistants that take initiative, anticipate user needs, and actively support information discovery.

Why This Workshop Matters

While LLMs have revolutionized how we interact with AI, most systems remain fundamentally reactive. This workshop brings together researchers from NLP, Information Retrieval, HCI, and Cognitive Science to define and advance proactive conversational AI—a field with immense potential to transform how humans and AI collaborate.

We're Looking For

• Research Papers:
  Short Papers (5-7 pages): Novel ideas, preliminary results
  Long Papers (10-12 pages): Comprehensive technical contributions
• Other Contributions:
  Perspective Papers (5-12 pages): Vision pieces, surveys, frameworks
  System Demonstrations (5-7 pages + demo): Working proactive systems
  Dataset & Resource Papers (5-12 pages): Benchmarks, evaluation resources

Key Research Areas

• Core Behaviors: Proactive question asking • Mixed-initiative dialogue • Anticipatory information retrieval • Asking clarification questions • Dialogue planning • Emotional support conversation  
• User Understanding: Context modeling • Cognitive load management • Expertise adaptation • Metacognitive awareness • User intent prediction • User preference modeling 
• Technical Foundations: LLMs for conversational IR • Memory models • Tool orchestration • Multi-modal assistance • Sequential information modeling • Long context modeling • Retrieval augmented conversation • Entity-relationship modeling
• Evaluation & Ethics: Novel metrics • Explainability • Privacy & fairness • Cultural adaptation
• Applications: Healthcare • Education • Finance • Legal • Enterprise search • Personal assistants 

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: August 31, 2025  (11:59 PM AoE)
• Notification: September 30, 2025
• Camera-Ready: October 10, 2025
• Workshop: November 14, 2025

Organizers

• Shubham Chatterjee (Missouri S&T)  
• Xi Wang (University of Sheffield)  
• Shuo Zhang (Bloomberg AI) 
• Sajad Ebrahimi (University of Guelph) 
• Zhaochun Ren (Leiden University) 
• Debasis Ganguly (University of Glasgow) 
• Gareth Jones (Dublin City University) 
• Emine Yilmaz (UCL) 
• Hamed Zamani (UMass Amherst)

Please share this announcement with colleagues who might be interested in proactive conversational AI research!