IR

We are pleased to report that on this 29th Anniversary of SIGIR, the Conference of Research and Development on Information Retrieval has attracted a record-breaking number of papers. There were 399 paper submissions representing the work of IR researchers in more than 35 countries. Seventy four (18.5%) of the submitted papers were accepted, representing the different geographic areas as follows: 49 from the Americas, 11 from Europe and 14 from Asia - Pacific. In addition to the full papers, 63 posters, 11 demonstrations, 8 tutorials and 9 workshops were accepted for inclusion in the technical program. A doctoral consortium with 9 PhD candidates is also part of the technical program. It is also worth noting that more than half of the accepted papers have a student as the first author, an encouraging sign for the growth and vitality of the community. The contributions in these proceedings represent a diverse and comprehensive coverage of IR research including theoretical models, techniques related to specific tasks (e.g. filtering, summarization, text categorization, question answering, and indexing), system performance, approaches to query formulation, retrieval in different environments (e.g. the Web, the enterprise, the desktop, multilingual, and multimedia), evaluation, and user studies.The selection of quality contributions for the SIGIR conference is dependent on a robust and equitable two tier reviewing process. The PC Chairs and 30 area coordinators for the 13 main topic areas in the call for papers, nominated nearly 250 primary reviewers. Each reviewer was semi-automatically assigned between 3 and 8 papers by the PC chairs in accordance to reviewers' stated subject expertise and each paper was allocated three reviewers. In cases where there was a wide range of scores or incomplete information, several primary reviewers helped us out with a number of additional reviews. The role of the area coordinators was to oversee the process for their topic area, by resolving disagreements between reviewers and producing a meta review for each paper drawn from the primary reviews. The meta reviews served as the basis of discussion at the Programme Committee meeting. Most area coordinators were responsible for 15 or more papers / meta reviews, and some bravely represented nearly 30 papers at the PC meeting, when a colleague was taken ill. Area coordinators were selected for their subject expertise in the different topic areas and attention was also paid to geographic representation and PC Committee experience. All the reviewing was double blind with the identity of authors being released only after the selection of papers was completed.