The ACM SIGIR Conference on Innovative Concepts and Theories in Information Retrieval (ICTIR) is a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), co-located each year with the SIGIR conference.
The Scope of ICTIR
ICTIR welcomes submissions that present scientific results, innovative concepts, or theoretical aspects related to information retrieval research. The conference embraces theory in a broad sense, including formal and cognitive theory, and encourages interdisciplinary research that connects information retrieval with other research disciplines that are theoretically motivated. Other research disciplines include, but are not limited to: artificial intelligence, cognitive science, digital humanities, machine learning, natural language processing, recommendation, and social computing.
ICTIR welcomes experiment-based papers, especially those whose results shed some light on the theoretical aspects of IR and related fields. While IR research traditionally demands rigorous experimentation, ICTIR does not see this as a must. That is, the lack of empirical results is not considered a weakness in an ICTIR submission. However, if the work is primarily theoretically driven, it should be presented in a way accessible to a wide audience in the IR community, and accompanied by good justifications and arguments.
Specific topics that are particularly welcome are decided by the ICTIR PC chairs each year.
ICTIR Steering Commitee
- Faegheh Hasibi (chair since 2024)
- Yi Fang (chair 2022-2023)
- Carsten Eickhoff
- Ingo Frommholz
- Julia Kiseleva
- Harrie Oosterhuis
- Fiana Raiber
- Dawei Song
- Masaharu Yoshioka
ICTIR Honorary Chairs:
- Bruce Croft
- Keith van Rijsbergen
Past Members of ICTIR Steering Committee:
- Krisztian Balog
- Evangelos Kanoulas
- Tetsuya Sakai (chair 2020-2021)