I am Rikiya Takehi, a fourth‑year undergraduate student in the Real Sakai Lab.
From 13 to 17 July 2025, I had the honor of attending SIGIR 2025 in Padua, Italy.
Our paper explores how to build reliable test collections through human–LLM collaboration:
LLM-Assisted Relevance Assessments: When Should We Ask LLMs for Help? (Rikiya Takehi, Ellen Voorhees, Tetsuya Sakai, Ian Soboroff).
Padua, Italy
It took me about 20 hours to fly from Tokyo. The weather was a little cooler than in Japan, and Padua’s old‑town streets were gorgeous. I also visited Venice, which was about a 30-minute train ride from the site.
The Conference
This was my second SIGIR, so I was happy to reunite with many people from last year. It was an honor to meet legends like Kalervo Järvelin and Stephen Robertson as well. My presentation was on Day 4, where I had many valuable discussions during and after the session. Sadly, we did not receive any awards this time:(
We also gave an invited talk at the eCOM workshop, where we talked about the forthcoming TREC Product Search and Recommendations Track.
The food was great and the location was fantastic. (Below are pictures of the Bloomberg party and the social dinner)
Overall
I had a great time socializing and meeting people at SIGIR. I felt there were even more researchers from Japanese academia than last year, and I would highly recommend submitting to SIGIR 2026 in Melbourne!