Awards

SIGIR presents three awards. The Gerard Salton Award is presented every three years to an individual who has made "... significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval". The Best Paper Award is presented to the individual(s) judged by a separate awards committee to have written the best paper appearing in the annual conference proceedings. The Best Student Paper is presented to the author of the best paper written solely or primarily by a student.

SIGIR also co-sponsors (with SIGWEB) the Vannevar Bush award, for the best paper at the JCDL conference.

Gerard Salton Award

This award honors those who have made "... significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval".

Year Honoree Presentation Lecture
2006 C.J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen
Keith van Rijsbergent

"Quantum haystacks"

"This acceptance talk is a curious mixture of personal history and developing ideas in the context of the growing field of IR covering several decades. I want to concentrate on models and theories, interpreted loosely, and try and give an insight into where I have got to in my thinking, where the ideas came from, and where I believe we are going. In the last few years I have been working on the development of what might be coined as a design language for IR. It takes its inspiration from Quantum Mechanics, but by analogy only. The mathematical objects represent documents; these objects might be vectors (or density operators) in an n-dimensional vector space (usually a Hilbert space)."
2003 W. Bruce Croft
Bruce Croft

"Information Retrieval and Computer Science: An Evolving Relationship"

For... "More than twenty years of significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. His contributions to the theoretical development and practical use of Bayesian inference networks and language modelling for retrieval, and to their evaluation through extensive experiment and application, are particularly important. The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval which he founded illustrates the strong synergies between fundamental research and its application to a wide range of practical information management problems."
2000 Stephen Robertson
Stephen Robertson

"On theoretical argument in information retrieval"

SIGIR Forum, 34 (1), 1-10 (April 2000)
For... "Thirty years of significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. Of special importance are the theoretical and empirical contributions to the development, refinement, and evaluation of probabilistic models of information retrieval."
1997 Tefko Saracevic
Tefko Saracevic

"Users lost (summary):
reflections on the past, future, and limits of information science
"

SIGIR Forum, 31 (2), 16-27 (Fall 1997).
1994 William Cooper
William Cooper

"The formalism of probability theory in IR: a foundation or an encumbrance?"

http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/proceedings/ir/
188490/p242-cooper/p242-cooper.pdf
1991 Cyril Cleverdon
Cyril Cleverdon

"The significance of the Cranfield tests on index languages"

Cyril Cleverdon 1914-1997: see Journal of Documentation 54(3), June 1998, 265-280.
1988 Karen Sparck Jones
Karen Spark Jones

"A look back and a look forward"

http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/proceedings/ir/
62437/p13-jones/p13-jones.pdf
1983 Gerard Salton
Gerald Salton

"About the future of automatic information retrieval"

Gerard Salton 1927-1995: see SIGIR Forum memorial issue.

Best Paper Award

The Best Paper Award is presented to the individual(s) judged by a separater awards committee to have written the best paper appearing in the annual conference proceedings.

Year Authors Citation
2007 Ryen White
Mikhail Bilenko
Silviu Cucerzan
Studying the Use of Popular Destinations to Enhance Web Search Interaction
2006 Ben Carterette
James Allan
Ramesh Sitaraman
Minimal Test Collections for Retrieval Evaluation
2005 Elad Yom-Tov
Shai Fine
David Carmel
Adam Darlow
Learning to Estimate Query Difficulty (Including Applications to Missing Content Detection and Distributed Information Retrieval)
2004 Hui Fang
Tao Tao
ChengXiang Zhai
A Formal Study of Information Retrieval Heuristics
2003 Ian Ruthven Re-examining the potential effectiveness of interactive query expansion
2002 Yi Zhang
Jamie Callan
Thomas Minka
Novelty and redundancy detection in adaptive filtering
2001 James Allan
Rahul Gupta
Vikas Khandelwal
Temporal Summaries of News Topics
2000 Kalervo Järvelin
Jaana Kekäläinen
IR evaluation methods for retrieving highly relevant documents.
1999 Jian-Yun Nie
Michel Simard
Pierre Isabelle
Richard Durand
Cross-language information retrieval based on automatic mining of parallel texts from the web
1998 Warren Greiff
A theory of term weighting based on exploratory data analysis
1997 H.T. Ng
W.B. Goh
K.L. Low
Feature selection, perceptron learning, and a usability case study for text categorization
1996 G.J.F. Jones
J.T. Foote
Karen Sparck Jones
S.J. Young
Retrieving spoken documents by combining multiple index sources

Best Student Paper Award

The Best Student Paper is presented to the author of the best paper written solely or primarily by a student.

Year Authors Citation
2007 D. Sculley (student)
Gabriel Wachman (student)
Relaxed online Support Vector Machines for spam filtering
2006 Ben Carterette (student)
James Allan
Ramesh Sitaraman
Minimal Test Collections for Retrieval Evaluation
2005 Donald Metzler (student)
Bruce Croft
A Markov random field model for term dependencies
2004 Hui Fang
Tao Tao
ChengXiang Zhai
A Formal Study of Information Retrieval Heuristics
2003 Stefanie Tellex (student)
Boris Katz
Jimmy Lin
Aaron Fernandes
Gregory Marton
Quantitative evaluation of passage retrieval algorithms for question answering
2002 Yi Zhang (student)
Jamie Callan
Thomas Minka
Novelty and redundancy detection in adaptive filtering
2001 Adnike Lam-Adesina (student)
Gareth Jones
Applying Summarization Techniques for Term Selection in Relevance Feedback 
2000 Ilmerio Reis da Silva (student)
Berthier Ribeiro-Neto
Pavel Calado (student)
Edleno Moura
Nivio Ziviani
Link-based and content-based evidential information in a belief network model.
1999 Owen de Krester
Alistair Moffat
Efficient document presentation with a locality-based similarity heuristic
1998 Martin Wechsler
Eugen Munteanu
Peter Schaeuble
New techniques for open-vocabulary spoken document retrieval
1997 Lisa Ballesteros
Bruce Croft
Phrasal translation and query expansion techniques for cross-language information retrieval
1996 Amit Singhal
Chris Buckley
Mandar Mitra
Pivoted length document normalization
1995
co-winners
Hinrich Schuetze
Jan Pedersen
David Hull
A comparison of classifiers and document representations for the routing problem.
Eric Brown
Fast evaluation of structured queries for information retrieval.

Best Poster Award

Year Authors Citation
1999 Michael Witbrock
Vibhu Mittal
Ultra-summarization: A statistical approach to generating highly condensed non-extractive summaries
1998 Ming-Jer Lee
Lee-Feng Chien
Automatic acquisition of phrasal knowledge for English-Chinese bilingual information retrieval
1997 K. Ng
V. Zue
An investigation of subword unit representations for spoken document retrieval