Second International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval

Second International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval
September 10-12, 2009
Cambridge, UK http://kmi.open.ac.uk/events/ictir09/

Introduction

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.

Accepted papers and posters will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Indicative topics of interest

Organizers 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, 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
• Visualisation

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

• 17 April 2009: Research papers
• 1 May 2009: Posters