International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR)

The International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) is the premier conference of theoretical information retrieval, co-located each year with the SIGIR conference.

The Scope of ICTIR

ICTIR welcomes submissions that discuss or utilise theoretical aspects of information retrieval, as well as 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.

While IR research traditionally relies heavily on rigorous experimentation, ICTIR does not see this as a must. That is, lack of experiments is not considered a weakness in an ICTIR submission. However, if the work is theoretically driven, it should be presented so that it is accessible to a wide audience in the IR community, and the theory should be accompanied by good justifications and arguments.

ICTIR does welcome experiment-based papers, but the experimental results are expected to shed some light on the theoretical aspects of IR and related fields.

Specific topics that are particularly welcome are decided by the ICTIR PC chairs each year.

ICTIR Steering Commitee

  • Faegheh Hasibi (2024-)
  • Yi Fang (chair 2022-2023)
  • Tetsuya Sakai (chair 2020-2021)
  • Evangelos Kanoulas
  • Dawei Song
  • Fiana Raiber
  • Krisztian Balog
  • Julia Kiseleva
  • Masaharu Yoshioka
  • Ingo Frommholz
ICTIR Honorary chairs:
  • Bruce Croft
  • Keith van Rijsbergen

ICTIR Steering Committee bylaws