Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on The Theory of Information Retrieval

The program chairs are excited to welcome you to the ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR); a new episode in the history of ICTIR where the conference has been embraced by ACM SIGIR and now runs for the first time under their flag. The conference aims to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), including, for example, new or improved models of relevance, ranking, representation, information needs, and evaluation. Norbert Fuhr helped define foundation precisely as a scientific result that others can build upon and use for their own research. The class of scientific works solicited in the call for papers thus covers both purely theoretical contributions as well as reproducible experimental results; where reproducibility is emphasized (e.g., through sharing the data sets and/or software implementations). The conference has been very successful in attracting high quality contributions, helping us compose a strong and varied program. In response to the call for contributions, the conference received a healthy number of submissions: 4 tutorials out of which we accepted 2 (or 50%), 43 short paper submissions where we accepted 22 (51%), and, 57 long paper submissions out of which 29 have been included in the final program (51%). (As an aside, due to the high quality of the submission pool, we would like to emphasize that acceptance rate is obviously not an indicator of quality!)