The International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) provides an opportunity for both new and established researchers to present, discuss, analyze and integrate new results and approaches in the theory of Information Retrieval (IR). In addition to the traditional and already well-established fields and approaches in IR, we welcome new approaches inspired from, e.g., mathematics, physics, linguistics, biology, philosophy, and other areas. 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 will be considered as well.

The purpose of the ICTIR conference is to promote discussion and interaction among those with theoretical and applicative research interests in mathematical/formal aspects of IR. It aims to provide a forum for the presentation of both theoretical and applicative results (e.g., foundational issues; description and/or integration of models; retrieval applications; mathematical/formal techniques, properties and structures in IR; existing and/or new theories and theoretical aspects). ICTIR has grown out of the Mathematical/Formal Methods workshops held at SIGIR 2000, Athens, Greece; SIGIR 2001, New Orleans, US; SIGIR 2002, Tampere, Finland; SIGIR 2003, Toronto, Canada; SIGIR 2004, Sheffield, U.K, and SIGIR 2005, Salvador, Brazil. These workshops have 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. We 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.

We particularly encourage postgraduate students or postdoctoral researchers to submit papers. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the theories and formal models of the following areas:

Foundations

* Mathematical Foundations of IR
* Probabilistic, Logical and Language Models
* Models based on Quantum Mechanics
* Information, meaning, content, entropy
* Properties and structures in IR
* IR architectures: peer-to-peer, distributed IR, grid
* Content representation and indexing
* Algorithms, complexity
* New approaches to IR

Wider context

* Philosophy of IR
* Sociology of IR
* Pedagogy of IR
* Linguistics of 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
* Machine learning
* Visualization

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, Ontologies
* Mobile IR

Authors are invited to submit research papers up to 12 pages representing original and previously unpublished work, on or before 17th of April 2009. Poster submission of up to 4 pages can be submitted until the 1st of May 2009. Submissions must be written in English, following the submission guidelines (TBD). Papers should be conference web site.

Important Dates

Paper submission: 17 April 2009
Poster submission: 1 May 2009
Acceptance/rejection notification: 15 June 2009
Submission of camera-ready copy: 1 July 2009
Conference: 10-11 September 2009
Networking event: 12 September 2009