ICTIR

Welcome to the 6th ACM SIGIR / 10th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2020). ICTIR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of Information Retrieval.

ICTIR 2020 was supposed to be held in Stavanger, Norway, known for its beautiful nature. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizing committee of ICTIR 2020 decided to move this year's conference online. This unexpected change challenged the organizers in several aspects. Despite the challenges, the General Chairs, Program Chairs and other organizing members worked diligently to carefully prepare an outstanding program for everyone.

We received a high-quality set of paper submissions to consider for inclusion in the conference program. We thank the 58 Program Committee (PC) members, and a number of additional reviewers for their contributions to paper selection.

Specifically, we received 42 full paper submissions and accepted 17 (40%) of them. We also received 23 short paper submissions and accepted 13 (57%) of them. For all papers, we initially assigned 3 PC members to provide first-level reviews. If the PC co-chairs believed that the review process would benefit from an additional review, we then assigned an additional PC to provide a fourth opinion. Based on the review comments and discussions, the final acceptance decisions were made by the PC co-chairs. In addition to paper submissions, we solicited tutorial proposals and accepted two of them. We sincerely hope that these papers and tutorials will help promote foundational ideas in information retrieval research.