* 1st Call for Contributions *
* Papers, Demos, Workshops and Tutorials *

The 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval

20 - 23 March, 2016
Padua, Italy
http://ecir2016.dei.unipd.it/
https://twitter.com/ecir2016

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The 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2016) will take place in Padua, Italy, 20-23 March 2016. ECIR is the main European forum for the presentation of new research results in the field of Information Retrieval (IR).

ECIR encourages the submission of high quality research papers reporting original, previously unpublished results. With the rapidly increasing amount of data produced in the world and the increasing adoption of IR techniques beyond the traditional search for documents, papers on IR applied to eScience and to the Internet of Things are particularly encouraged.

ECIR has a strong student focus, hence papers whose sole or main author is a postgraduate student are especially welcome. Through the student mentoring programme, PhD students can request the assistance of a mentor, who can give advice and suggest improvements to an almost complete paper. More details on the student mentoring programme are on the website.


Full Papers and Short Papers
----------------------------
We are seeking the submission of high-quality and original full papers, short papers and demos. Submissions will be reviewed by experts on the basis of the originality of the work, the validity of the results, chosen methodology, writing quality and the overall contribution to the field of IR.

Short Paper submissions addressing any of the areas identified in the conference topics are also invited. Authors are encouraged to describe work in progress and late-breaking research results.


Demonstrations
--------------
Demonstrations present research prototypes or operational systems. They provide opportunities to exchange ideas gained from implementing IR systems and to obtain feedback from expert users. Demonstration submissions are welcome in any of the areas related to aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), as identified in the call for papers on the ECIR website.

The demonstration submission should address clear research questions like: What problem does my system solve? Who is my target user?

Demonstrations that make their source code freely available are especially encouraged. We ask all authors to either provide a URL to a live online version of their demo or, alternatively, provide a URL to a video showcasing the main features of their demo.


Tutorials
---------
Tutorials inform the community on recent advances in core IR research, related research, or on novel application areas related to IR. They may focus on specific problems or specific domains in which IR research may be applied. Tutorials can be of either a half-day (3 hours plus breaks) or a full day (6 hours plus breaks) duration. Tutorials are encouraged to be as interactive as possible. The information required for a tutorial proposal is on the conference website. Tutorial proposals will be reviewed by the tutorial committee. A summary of the tutorial will be published in the conference proceedings.


Workshops
---------
The purpose of workshops is to provide a platform for presenting novel ideas and research results in a focused and more interactive way. Workshops can be of either a half-day (3 hours plus breaks) or a full day (6 hours plus breaks) duration. Workshops are encouraged to be as dynamic and interactive as possible and should lead to a concrete outcome, such as the publication of a summary paper and/or workshop proceedings. The information required for a workshop proposal is on the conference website. Workshop proposals will be reviewed by the workshop committee. A summary of the workshop will be published in the conference proceedings.


Reproducible IR Research Track
------------------------------
We are happy to announce the Reproducible IR Research Track introduced at ECIR 2015 will continue for ECIR 2016. Reproducibility is key for establishing research to be reliable, referenceable and extensible for the future. Experimental papers are therefore most useful when their results can be tested and generalised by peers. This track specifically invites submission of papers reproducing a single or a group of papers, from a third-party where you have *not* been directly involved (e.g., *not* been an author or a collaborator). Emphasise your motivation for selecting the paper/papers, the process of how results have been attempted to be reproduced (successful or not), the communication that was necessary to gather all information, the potential difficulties encountered and the result of the process. A successful reproduction of the work is not a requirement, but it is important to provide a clear and rigid evaluation of the process to allow lessons to be learned for the future.


Submission guidelines
---------------------
All submissions must be written in English following the ECIR guidelines (http://irsg.bcs.org/proceedings/ECIR_Draft_Guidelines.pdf) and the LNCS author guidelines (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0) and submitted electronically through the conference submission system

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecir2016

selecting the proper track.

Full papers must not exceed 12 pages, short papers must not exceed 6 pages, demonstration papers must not exceed 4 pages, reproducible IR track papers must not exceed 12 pages, including references and figures.

Full paper, short paper and reproducible IR track paper submissions will be refereed through double-blind peer review. Demonstration papers will undergo single-blind review.

Accepted full papers, short papers, demos and reproducible IR track papers will be published in the conference proceedings published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. The proceedings will be distributed to all delegates at the Conference. Accepted full papers, short papers, demos and reproducible IR track papers will have to be presented at the conference. Short papers and reproducible IR track papers will either be presented as a poster or as an oral presentation.

Accepted workshops and tutorials will have a 4 pages summary published in the conference proceedings.


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IMPORTANT DATES
================

Papers
------
09 October 2015 - Full/Short Paper submission deadline
09 October 2015 - Reproducible IR Track submission deadline
23 October 2015 - Demo submission deadline
04 December 2015 - Notification on Full Papers, Short Papers, Demos, Reproducible IR Track Papers
11 January 2016 - Camera-ready

Mentoring
---------
07 August 2015 - Request for mentoring deadline
21 August 2015 - Mentor assignment deadline

Workshops / Tutorials
---------------------
11 September 2015 - Workshops / Tutorials submission deadline
19 October 2015 - Notification on Workshops / Tutorials

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TOPICS
=======

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* IR Theory and Practice
- Searching, browsing, meta-searching
- Data fusion, filtering and indexing
- Language models, probabilistic IR, neural network based models
- Learning to rank
- Content classification, categorisation, clustering
- Relevance feedback, query expansion, faceted retrieval
- Topic detection and tracking, novelty detection
- Recommender systems
- Content-based filtering, collaborative filtering
- Spam detection and filtering
- Personalised, collaborative or user-adaptive IR
- Adversarial IR
- Privacy in IR
- Contextual IR
- Mobile, Geo and local search
- Temporal IR, time-based modelling
- Entity IR

* Web and Social Media IR
- Link analysis
- Query log analysis
- Advertising and ad targeting
- Spam detection
- Trust, authority, reputation, ranking
- Blog and online-community search, microblogs
- Social search
- Social tagging
- Social networking and Web based communities
- Trend identification and tracking
- Time series and forecasting

* User aspects
- User modelling, user studies, user interaction and history
- Interactive IR
- Task-based IR
- Click models
- Novel user interfaces for IR systems
- Visualisation of queries, search results or content
- Multimodal aspects, multimodal querying

* IR system architectures
- Distributed and peer to peer IR
- Cloud IR
- Federated IR
- Aggregated Search
- Fusion/Combination
- Open, interoperable and flexible systems
- Performance, scalability, efficiency
- Architectures and platforms
- Crawling and indexing
- Compression, optimisation
- Map/Reduce for IR

* Content representation and processing
- IR for semi-structured documents
- IR for semantically annotated collections, semantic search
- Reasoning for IR
- Meta information and structures, metadata
- Query representation, query reformulation
- Text categorisation and clustering
- Text data mining
- Opinion mining, sentiment analysis, argumentation mining
- Cross-language retrieval, multilingual retrieval
- Machine translation for IR
- Question answering
- Natural language processing
- Summarization for IR

* Evaluation
- Evaluation methods and metrics
- Building test collections
- Experimental design
- Crowdsourcing for evaluation, human computing
- User-oriented and user-centred test and evaluation
- Metric comparison and evaluation
- Offline vs online evaluation

* Multimedia and cross-media IR
- Speech retrieval
- Image and video retrieval
- Entity retrieval
- Digital music, radio and broadcast retrieval
- Virtual reality and information access
- Cross-modal processing and search

* Applications
- Digital libraries
- Enterprise and intranet search
- Desktop search
- Mobile IR
- Genomic IR, IR for chemical structures
- Medical IR
- Legal IR, patent search
- eScience
- The Internet of Things

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ORGANIZERS
===========

General Chair:
- Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy

Programme Chairs:
- Fabio Crestani, University of Lugano (USI), Switzerland
- Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven, Belgium

Short Paper Chairs:
- Josiane Mothe, ESPE, IRIT, Université de Toulouse, France
- Fabrizio Silvestri, Yahoo! Labs, London

Student Mentor Chairs:
- Jaana Kekäläinen, University of Tampere, Finland
- Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

Workshop Chairs:
- Paul Clough, University of Sheffield, UK
- Gabriella Pasi, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy

Demo Chairs:
- Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, University of Padua, Italy
- Claudia Hauff, TU Delft, The Netherlands

Industry Day Chairs:
- Omar Alonso, Microsoft Bing, USA
- Pavel Serdyukov, Yandex, Russia

Tutorial Chairs:
- Christina Lioma, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Stefano Mizzaro, University of Udine, Italy

Local Organization Chair:
- Gianmaria Silvello, University of Padua, Italy

Sponsorship Chair:
- Emanuele Di Buccio, University of Padua, Italy








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