Call for Papers

Submission Deadlines: 

May 18 - All submissions due
May 4 - Long paper submissions due
May 11 - Long paper submissions due
May 11 - Short paper submissions (and tutorial proposals) due

The ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), including, for example, new or improved models of relevance, ranking, representation, information needs, and evaluation. A foundation is a scientific result that others can build upon and use for their own research. This might be a theoretical result, or a reproducible experimental result. The need for formal frameworks is universal across the many applications of information retrieval. In addition to foundational research into established approaches in IR, the conference encourages the submission of papers that are attempting to define new tasks, develop new search paradigms, or apply methods from related disciplines, such as natural language processing, machine learning, statistics, or quantum mechanics. Large-scale experimental studies are not required for ICTIR papers, although some evidence in support of new theories is expected. However, reproducibility of research results is emphasized (e.g., through sharing the data sets and/or software implementations).

With an emphasis on reproducibility and appreciation of theoretical work, the topic areas covered by ICTIR include, but are not limited to:

Document Representation and Content Analysis

E.g., text representation, linguistic analysis, sentiment analysis, clustering, multilinguality

Queries and Query Analysis

E.g., query representation, query intent, question answering, query reformulation

Users and Interactive IR

E.g., user models, formal models of user interactions, summarization, task models, personalized search, collaborative IR

Retrieval Models and Ranking

E.g., probabilistic retrieval models, feature-based models, learning to rank, diversity, context-awareness, multidimensional relevance

Search Engine Architectures and Scalability

E.g., indexing methods, optimization

Filtering and Recommending

E.g., content-based filtering, collaborative filtering

Evaluation

E.g., effectiveness measures, experimental design

Web IR and Social Media Search

E.g., link analysis, social network analysis

IR and Structured Data

E.g., entity search, semantic search

Multimedia IR

E.g., image search, video search, music IR

Other Applications

E.g., genomics IR, legal IR, patent search, social media search

ICTIR accepts both long and short paper submissions. All submissions must describe work that is not previously published, not accepted for publication elsewhere, and not currently under review elsewhere. The same work cannot be submitted as both a long paper and a short paper.

All submissions must be in English, in PDF format, and in SIGIR two-column format. Long paper submissions should not exceed 10 pages, and short paper submissions should not exceed 4 pages, including references and figures. Suitable LaTeX and Word templates for SIGIR are available from the ACM Website.

The review process for all submissions is double-blind, and authors must take all reasonable steps to conceal their identity. Submissions will be rejected without review if they are over the specified page limit, or if they violate the formatting guidelines in other ways (such as the use of too-small fonts, including in graphs and figures), or if they are not anonymous, or if they are incomplete.

Papers must be submitted electronically using the conftool conference submission system, conftool.net/ictir2015.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for and attend ICTIR 2015.