The 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017) (http://www.ecir2017.org/) will take place in Aberdeen, Scotland from 8 - 13 April 2017. ECIR is the main European forum for the presentation of new research results in the field of Information Retrieval (IR).



ECIR 2017 encourages the submission of high quality research papers reporting original and previously unpublished results. With the rapidly increasing amount of data produced at present, and the increasing adoption of IR techniques beyond the traditional search for documents, papers on IR applied to real-life information problems (e.g., eScience, the Internet of Things, User behaviours and analyses etc.) are particularly encouraged.



ECIR has a strong student focus, hence papers whose sole or main author is a postgraduate student or a postdoctoral researcher are especially welcome. Through the Doctoral Consortium, PhD students can introduce their current work and receive advice and feedback from members of the IR Community.

Full Papers, Short Papers

We are seeking the submission of high-quality and original full and short papers. Submissions will be reviewed by experts on the basis of originality, validity of results, chosen methodology, writing quality and the overall contribution to the field of IR.



Short Paper submissions addressing any of the areas identified in the conference topics are also welcome. Authors are encouraged to describe work in progress and late-breaking research.

Tutorials

Tutorials inform the community of recent advances in core IR research, related research, or novel application areas related to IR. They may focus on specific problems or domains where IR research may be applied. Tutorials can be of either a half-day (3 hours plus breaks) or a full day (6 hours plus breaks). Tutorials are encouraged to be as interactive as possible. A university computer teaching laboratory (including multiple computers for students and projection of the instructor’s screen) could be made available for hands-on tutorials. The information required for a tutorial proposal is on the conference website. Tutorial proposals will be reviewed by the tutorial committee. A summary of the tutorial will be published in the conference proceedings.

Workshops

The purpose of workshops is to provide a platform for presenting novel ideas and research results in a focused and more interactive way. Workshops can be of either a half-day (3 hours plus breaks) or a full day (6 hours plus breaks). Workshops are encouraged to be as dynamic and interactive as possible and should lead to a concrete outcome, such as the publication of a summary paper and/or workshop proceedings. The information required for a workshop proposal is on the conference website. Workshop proposals will be reviewed by the workshop committee and a summary of the workshop will be published in the conference proceedings.

Demonstrations

Demonstrations present research prototypes or operational systems. They provide opportunities to exchange ideas gained from implementing IR systems and to obtain feedback from expert users. Demonstration submissions are welcome in any of the areas related to aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), as identified in the Topics of Interest listed below.



The demonstration submission should address clear research questions like: What problem does my system solve? Who is my target user?

Demonstrations that make their source code freely available are especially encouraged. We ask all authors to either provide a URL to a live online version of their demo or, alternatively, provide a URL to a video showcasing the main features of their demo.

Reproducible IR Research Track

We are happy to announce that the Reproducible IR Research Track introduced at ECIR 2015 will continue for ECIR 2017. Reproducibility is critical for establishing reliable, referenceable and extensible research for the future. Experimental papers are therefore most useful when their results can be tested and generalised by peers. This track specifically invites submission of papers reproducing a single or a group of papers, from a third-party where you have *NOT* been directly involved (e.g., *not* been an author or a collaborator). Emphasise your motivation for selecting the paper/papers, the process of how results have been attempted to be reproduced (successful or not), the communication that was necessary to gather all information, the potential difficulties encountered and the result of the process. A successful reproduction of the work is not a requirement, but it is important to provide a clear and rigid evaluation of the process to allow lessons to be learned for the future.

Paper Submission Guidelines

All submissions must be written in English following the ECIR guidelines (http://irsg.bcs.org/proceedings/ECIR_Draft_Guidelines.pdf) and the LNCS author guidelines (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0) and submitted electronically through the conference submission system.



Full papers/ reproducible IR track papers must not exceed 12 pages, short papers must not exceed 6 pages, and demonstration papers must not exceed 4 pages, including references and figures.



Full, short and reproducible IR track paper submissions will be refereed through double-blind peer review. Demonstration papers will undergo single-blind review.

Accepted full papers, short papers, demos and reproducible IR track papers will be published in the conference proceedings published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. The proceedings will be distributed to all delegates at the Conference. Accepted full papers, short papers, demos and reproducible IR track papers will have to be presented at the conference. Short papers and reproducible IR track papers will either be presented as a poster or as an oral presentation.

Important Dates

· 9 September 2016 (AoE time zone): Workshops / Tutorials submission deadline

· 7 October 2016 (AoE time zone): Full/Short Paper submission deadline

· 7 October 2016 (AoE time zone): Reproducible IR Track submission deadline

· 17 October 2016 (AoE time zone): Notification of acceptance of Workshops / Tutorials

· 21 October 2016 (AoE time zone): Demo submission deadline

· 2 December 2016 (AoE time zone): Notification of Full/Short Papers, Demos, Reproducible IR Track Papers

AoE deadline “means that the deadline has not passed if, anywhere on earth, the deadline date has not yet passed” [http://www.ieee802.org/16/aoe.html]

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

IR Theory and Practice

· Searching, browsing, meta-searching

· Data fusion, filtering and indexing

· Language models, probabilistic IR, neural network based models

· Learning to rank

· Content classification, categorisation, clustering

· Relevance feedback, query expansion, faceted retrieval

· Topic detection and tracking, novelty detection

· Recommender systems

· Content-based filtering, collaborative filtering

· Spam detection and filtering

· Personalised, collaborative or user-adaptive IR

· Adversarial IR

· Privacy in IR

· Contextual IR

· Mobile, Geo and local search

· Temporal IR, time-based modelling

· Entity IR

Deep Learning and IR

· Neural Networks and IR

· Word embedding and IR

· Semantics and IR

· Topic Modelling and IR

Web and Social Media IR

· Link analysis

· Query log analysis

· Advertising and ad targeting

· Spam detection

· Trust, authority, reputation, ranking

· Blog and online-community search, microblogs

· Social search

· Social tagging

· Social networking and Web based communities

· Trend identification and tracking

· Time series and forecasting

User Aspects

· User modelling, user studies, user interaction and history

· Interactive IR

· Task-based IR

· Click models

· Novel user interfaces for IR systems

· Visualisation of queries, search results or content

· Multimodal aspects, multimodal querying

IR System Architectures

· Distributed and peer to peer IR

· Cloud IR

· Federated IR

· Aggregated Search

· Fusion/Combination

· Open, interoperable and flexible systems

· Performance, scalability, efficiency

· Architectures and platforms

· Crawling and indexing

· Compression, optimisation

· Map/Reduce for IR

Content Representation and Processing

· IR for semi-structured documents

· IR for semantically annotated collections, semantic search

· Reasoning for IR

· Meta information and structures, metadata

· Query representation, query reformulation

· Text categorisation and clustering

· Text data mining

· Opinion mining, sentiment analysis, argumentation mining

· Cross-language retrieval, multilingual retrieval

· Machine translation for IR

· Question answering

· Natural language processing

· Summarisation for IR

Evaluation

· Evaluation methods and metrics

· Building test collections

· Experimental design

· Crowdsourcing for evaluation, human computing

· User-oriented and user-centred test and evaluation

· Metric comparison and evaluation

· Offline vs online evaluation

Multimedia and Cross-Media IR

· Speech retrieval

· Image and video retrieval

· Entity retrieval

· Digital music, radio and broadcast retrieval

· Virtual reality and information access

· Cross-modal processing and search

Applications

· Digital libraries

· Enterprise and intranet search

· Desktop search

· Mobile IR

· Genomic IR, IR for chemical structures

· Medical IR

· Legal IR, patent search

· eScience

· The Internet of Things

· User Behaviour Analyses
General Chair:

· Ayşe Göker (Robert Gordon University, UK)
Program Chairs:

· Joemon Jose (University of Glasgow, UK)

· Claudia Hauff (TU Delft, NL)
Local Chairs:

· Virginia Dawod (Robert Gordon University, UK)
Short Paper Chairs:

· Dawei Song (Open University, UK)

· Ismail Altıngövde (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)
Workshop Chairs:

· Pia Borlund (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

· Jaana Kekalainen (University of Tampere, Finland)
Industry Day Chairs:

· David Harper (Google Zurich, Switzerland)

· Richard Boulton (Lemur Consulting/Digital Cabinet Office, UK)

· Hans Myrhaug (Ambiesense, UK)
Demo Chairs:

· Dyaa Albakour (Signal Media, UK)

· Stuart Watt (Turalt / University Health Network, Toronto, Canada)
Tutorial Chairs:

· Daqing He (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

· Fazlı Can (Bilkent University, Turkey)

· Eero Sorumunen (University of Tampere, Finland)
Doctoral Consortium Chairs:

· Emine Yılmaz (University College London, UK)

· Mohamed Gaber (Robert Gordon University, UK)
Doctoral Consortium Team:

· David Hawking (Bing Canberra, Australia)

· Olga Vechtamova (University of Waterloo, Canada)

· Bekir Dinçer (Muğla University, Turkey)
Local Organization
Web Chair:

· Michael Heron (Robert Gordon University, UK)
Publicity:

· Martin Halvey (University of Strathclyde, UK)

· Chris Day (Robert Gordon University, UK)

· Adam Wyner (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Sponsorship:

· Andrei Petrovski (Robert Gordon University, UK)

· Susan Craw (Robert Gordon University, UK)

· Yaşar Tonta (Hacettepe University, Turkey)
Support:

· John Isaacs (Robert Gordon University, UK)

· Leszek Kaliciak (Robert Gordon University, UK)

· Stewart Massie (Robert Gordon University, UK)