[AAAI 2026] Top 5 trends to watch in the future of IR research (and why they are irrelevant)

Recorded live at the Singapore Expo, Singapore Tue, 27 Jan 2026 As part of the AAAI 2026 New Frontiers in IR (https://frontier-ir-workshop.github.io/) Slides available at https://soc-n.us/270127-top-five-ir Video available at https://soc-n.us/270127-top-five-ir-yt What are the likely trends in the future of information retrieval for 2026? I discuss five trends, give evidence for their provenance and impact, but you will have heard about many of these trends from previous speakers. Paradoxically, it may be better for some in the field not to follow these trends and I discuss why. Bio: Min-Yen Kan (BS; MS; PhD Columbia Univ.; SACM, SIEEE) is an Associate Professor and Vice Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the National University of Singapore. Min is an active member of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), currently serving as a co-chair for its Ethics Committee. He is also the survey editor for the Journal of AI Research (JAIR). His research interests include digital libraries, natural language processing and information retrieval. Specific projects include work in the areas of scientific discourse analysis, fact verification, full-text literature mining, lexical semantics, and the socio-ethical alignment and reasoning aspects of large language models. He leads the Web Information Retrieval / Natural Language Processing Group (WING.NUS) http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/ 00:00 Envisioning the Future of IR 5:08 The Top Five 13:42 (and why they are irrelevant) 20:40 Encore 34:07 Question Session