SIGIR 2021 Test of Time Award

The SIGIR Test of Time Award recognizes research that has had long-lasting influence, including impact on a subarea of information retrieval research, across subareas of information retrieval research, and outside of the information retrieval research community (e.g. non-information retrieval research or industry). The winning paper is selected from the set of full papers presented at the main SIGIR conference 10-12 years before. The SIGIR 2021 award will be selected from the set of full papers presented at SIGIR 2009, 2010 and 2011. A detailed description of the 2014 selection process can be found in the December 2014 SIGIR Forum. Previous years’ awards can be found on the SIGIR Test of Time page.

The Test of Time Award winner will be announced at SIGIR 2021. The award consists of,

  • reprinting the paper in the December SIGIR Forum with a short preface written by the committee,
  • a plaque, and
  • documentation on the SIGIR website.

In addition to the Test of Time Award winner, the committee will select up to three honorable mentions among the full papers from SIGIR 2009.

The award is selected by a committee composed of past Program Committee chairs as well as a Test of Time Award chair selected by the Executive Committee. The members of this year’s committee are listed at the end of this page.

The committee will select a subset of the candidates to evaluate for the award. Of the qualifying papers, the top 5 papers from the SIGIR main conference ranked by citation according to the ACM Digital Library will automatically be nominated for consideration.* This year’s automatically nominated papers are listed below. In addition, we encourage nominations from the community of papers not automatically selected. Nominations should include,

  1. the title, author/s, and year of the paper (it has to be from SIGIRs 2009, 2010, 2011),
  2. the URL of the paper in the ACM Digital Library,
  3. a short paragraph justifying the nomination,
  4. the names and full contact details of at least three members of the community who endorse the nomination

None of the endorsers may have a conflict of interest with the paper. A definition of what constitutes a conflict can be found below.

Nominations are due by February 12, 2021 (anywhere in the world).

Please submit nominations using this form.

Automatically-Nominated Publications

SIGIR 2011

  • Exploiting geographical influence for collaborative point-of-interest recommendation
    Mao Ye, Peifeng Yin, Wang Chien Lee, Dik Lun Lee
  • Fast context-aware recommendations with factorization machines
    Steffen Rendle, Zeno Gantner, Christoph Freudenthaler, Lars Schmidt-Thieme
  • Collective entity linking in web text: a graph-based method
    Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Jun Zhao
  • Functional matrix factorizations for cold-start recommendation
    Ke Zhou, Shuang-Hong Yang, Hongyuan Zha
  • Composite hashing with multiple information sources
    Dan Zhang, Feiyue Wang, Luo Si

SIGIR 2010

  • Uncovering social spammers: social honeypots + machine learning
    Kyumin Lee, James Caverlee, Steve Webb
  • Self-taught hashing for fast similarity search
    Dell Zhang, Jun Wang, Deng Cai, Jinsong Lu
  • Evaluating and predicting answer quality in community QA
    Chirag Shah, Jefferey Pomerantz
  • Social media recommendation based on people and tags
    Ido Guy, Naama Zwerdling, Inbal Ronen, David Carmel, Erel Uziel
  • Temporal diversity in recommender systems
    Neal Lathia, Stephen Hailes, Licia Capra, Xavier Amatriain

SIGIR 2009

  • Learning to recommend with social trust ensemble
    Hao Ma, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu
  • On social networks and collaborative recommendation
    Ioannis Konstas, Vassilios Stathopoulos, Joemon M. Jose
  • Placing flickr photos on a map
    Pavel Serdyukov, Vanessa Murdock, Roelof van Zwol
  • Named entity recognition in query
    Jiafeng Guo, Gu Xu, Xueqi Cheng, Hang Li
  • Portfolio theory of information retrieval
    Jun Wang, Jianhan Zhu
  • A syntactic tree matching approach to finding similar questions in community-based QA services
    Kai Wang, Zhaoyan Ming, Tat-Seng Chua

Conflicts of Interest

An individual is in conflict with a candidate paper if

  1. they are a co-author of the candidate paper,
  2. they currently are or were in the three previous years at the same department as a co-author of the candidate paper,
  3. they have collaborated in the three previous years with a co-author of the candidate paper,
  4. they are a relative of a co-author of the candidate paper.

In addition, there may be special cases of conflicts of interest that need to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Committee

  • Hannah Bast (chair)
  • Peter Bruza
  • Charles Clarke
  • Kalervo Järvelin
  • Jaap Kamps
  • Arjen de Vries
  • Ji-Rong Wen
  • Ryen White