Second ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval
September 12-16, 2016, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

Submission Deadlines:
- April 15, 2016 Long paper submissions
- April 22, 2016 Short paper submissions

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, user information access 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 encouraged (e.g., through sharing the data sets and/or software implementations).

Topics:
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, metrics, user engagement
- Web IR and Social Media Search
E.g., link analysis, click model, social network analysis
- IR and Structured Data
E.g., entity search, semantic search
- Multimedia IR
E.g., image search, video search, music IR
- Mobile Experience
E.g. mobile-specific ranking models, user models, evaluation models
- Other Applications
E.g., genomics IR, legal IR, patent search, social media search, medical IR

Submissions
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, http://www.conftool.net/ictir2016.
Authors will be offered the opportunity to reply to reviewer’s comments during the rebuttal period. The final reviews and decisions will take this into account.
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for and attend ICTIR 2016.

Important Dates:
April 15, 2016 Long paper submissions
April 22, 2016 Short paper submissions
June 18-24, 2016 Author rebuttal
June 30, 2016 Notification of acceptance for all submissions
July 22, 2016 Camera ready deadline
September 12-16, 2016 ICTIR 2016 Conference

Organizers:
- General Chairs
Ben Carterette, University of Delaware (USA)
Hui Fang, University of Delaware (USA)
- Program Chairs, Long papers
Mounia Lalmas, Yahoo! (UK)
Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal (Canada)
- Program Chairs, short papers
Fernando Diaz, Microsoft Research (USA)
Stefano Mizzaro, University of Udine (Italy)
- Tutorial Chair
Grace Hui Yang, Georgetown University (USA)