[RecSys 2026] Last Call for RecSys Challenge

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the Call for RecSys Challenge for ACM RecSys 2026,
the leading conference on recommender systems, taking place September 28 –
October 2, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.


The RecSys Challenge 2026: Music-CRS focuses on the evolving landscape of
music discovery, where static recommendation lists are being replaced by
dynamic, conversational interactions. As users increasingly interact with
AI through natural language, there is a critical need for systems that can
seamlessly integrate Natural Language Understanding (NLU) with
high-precision Recommender Systems (RecSys). This challenge aims to push
the boundaries of how AI understands nuanced user preferences, explores
musical tastes through dialogue, and provides contextually relevant track
recommendations.


By utilizing the TalkPlayData-Challenge dataset, a large-scale conversation
resource generated through an advanced agentic pipeline, we invite the
global research community to tackle the complexities of multi-turn
preference elicitation. As a research community-driven initiative, the
challenge dataset features LLM-generated multi-turn dialogues paired with
music metadata and user-item interaction data derived from publicly
available research datasets. No SiriusXM or Deezer user data is included in
the dataset. This challenge serves as a bridge between the NLP and RecSys
communities, fostering next-generation innovation in interactive and
personalized music information retrieval.


The evaluation is designed to reflect both recommendation quality and
response quality. The shared task materials identify ranking quality as a
core evaluation component, while the overall challenge framing emphasizes
the importance of interactive, personalized, and explainable recommendation
behavior. The Prize will be $1000 for the First Team from the participants,
and $1000 for the First Academic Team.


A detailed description of the task, dataset resources, baseline materials,
and submission format is available on the following pages:

RecSys 2026 Challenge Website: https://www.recsyschallenge.com/2026/

RecSys 2026 Website: https://recsys.acm.org/recsys26/challenge/

We encourage you to participate in the ACM RecSys Challenge 2026. Looking
forward to your contributions!

Best regards,
Noemi Mauro and Pan Li
On behalf of the ACM RecSys 2026 Organizing Committee

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    To unsubscribe from CHI-ANNOUNCEMENTS send an email to:
     mailto:[email protected]

    To manage your SIGCHI Mailing lists or read our polices see:
     https://sigchi.org/operations/listserv/
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------