Call for Papers

The International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) aims to provide a forum for discussion and interaction among those with theoretical and applicative research interests in mathematical/formal aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), including, e.g., foundational issues, description or integration of models, retrieval applications, mathematical/formal techniques, existing and/or new theories and theoretical aspects.

ICTIR has grown out of the Mathematical/Formal Methods workshops held annually at SIGIR between 2000 and 2005. These workshops demonstrated that the mathematical/formal results achieved in IR could be organized into a coherent theoretical framework, bringing new knowledge to IR, and that mathematical/formal research can stand as a specialized research area of IR. The first ICTIR conference was held in 2007 in Budapest, Hungary, with the overall aim to explore the multi-valued meaning of IR, combining areas like mathematics and linguistics.

The second ICTIR conference in 2009 aims to continue in the same spirit, promoting research in the wider contexts of IR. Reflecting this, in addition to the established fields and approaches in IR, research papers on new approaches inspired from sociology, mathematics, physics, linguistics, biology, philosophy, and other areas are sought. Papers that demonstrate a high level of research adventure or which break out of the traditional IR paradigms are particularly welcome. Experimental and/or practical results from new paradigms are also of interest.

Indicative topics of interest

We seek high-quality and original research papers and posters that have not been previously published and are not under review for another conference or journal. Submissions will be reviewed by experts on the basis of the originality of the work, the validity of the chosen methodology and their results, quality of writing and the overall contribution to the field of IR. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the theories and formal models appropriate to the following areas:

Foundations

Mathematical Foundations of IR
Probabilistic, logical, language, and social IR models, and quantum mechanics based models
Information, meaning, content, entropy
Properties and structures in IR
IR architectures: peer-to-peer, distributed IR, grid
Content representation and indexing
Algorithms, complexity
New models, frameworks and approaches to IR

Techniques

Evaluation methodologies, test collections, metrics
User modelling and user interactions
Context issues
Browsing, semantic search, meta-search
Bibliometrics for IR and citation analysis
Social networks and media, on-line community analysis, social tagging
Classification, categorization, and clustering
Machine learning
Visualization

Applications

Web IR
Enterprise search
Expert search
Interactive IR
Text mining
Digital libraries
XML retrieval
Multimedia retrieval
Domain-specific IR (blog, legal, biomedical, book, etc.)
Recommender systems
Filtering
Semantic Web
Mobile IR

Wider context

Philosophy of IR
Sociology of IR
Pedagogy of IR
Linguistics of IR

Important dates

April 27, 2009: Research papers
May 1, 2009: Posters

Submission guidelines

Authors are invited to submit research papers up to 12 pages, or posters of up to 4 pages, representing original and previously unpublished work.

Submissions must be written in English, following the submission guidelines set by Springer, published at http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0. Additional information for authors can be found at www.springer.com/lncs.

Submissions will go through a blind review process. Therefore, please anonymize your submission. This means that submissions should not contain any information identifying the author(s) or their organization(s): do not put the author(s) names or affiliation(s) at the start of the paper, anonymize citations to and mentions of own prior work in the paper, and do not include funding or other acknowledgments in papers submitted for review.

All accepted papers and posters will be published by Springer in the Proceedings of ICTIR'09, as part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. In addition, a special edition of the Journal of Information Retrieval will be published from extended versions of the selected best papers.

Papers should be submitted through the EasyChair conference web site at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ictir09