by Leif Azzopardi, Benno Stein, Norbert Fuhr, Philipp Mayr, Claudia Hauff, and Djoerd Hiemstra
The 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) was held in Cologne, Germany, during April 14–18, 2019, and brought together hundreds of researchers from Europe and abroad. The conference was organized by GESIS–Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the University of Duisburg-Essen — in cooperation with the British Computer Society’s Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS-IRSG). These proceedings contain the papers, presentations, workshops, and tutorials given during the conference. This year the ECIR 2019 program boasted a variety of novel work from contributors from all around the world and provided new platforms for promoting information retrieval-related (IR) activities from the CLEF Initiative. In total, 365 submissions were fielded across the tracks from 50 different countries.
The final program included 39 full papers (23% acceptance rate), 44 short papers (29% acceptance rate), eight demonstration papers (67% acceptance rate), nine reproducibility full papers (75% acceptance rate), and eight invited CLEF papers. All submissions were peer reviewed by at least three international Program Committee members to ensure that only submissions of the highest quality were included in the final program. As part of the reviewing process we also provided more detailed review forms and guidelines to help reviewers identify common errors in IR experimentation as a way to help ensure consistency and quality across the reviews.
The accepted papers cover the state of the art in IR: evaluation, deep learning, dialogue and conversational approaches, diversity, knowledge graphs, recommender systems, retrieval methods, user behavior, topic modelling, etc., and also include novel application areas beyond traditional text and Web documents such as the processing and retrieval of narrative histories, images, jobs, biodiversity, medical text, and math. The program boasted a high proportion of papers with students as first authors, as well as papers from a variety of universities, research institutes, and commercial organizations.
In addition to the papers, the program also included two keynotes, four tutorials, four workshops, a doctoral consortium, and an industry day. The first keynote was presented by this year’s BCS IRSG Karen Sparck Jones Award winner, Prof. Krisztian Balog, On Entities and Evaluation, and the second keynote was presented by Prof. Markus Strohmaier, On Ranking People. The tutorials covered a range of topics from conducting lab-based experiments and statistical analysis to categorization and deeplearning, while the workshops brought together participants to discuss algorithm selection (AMIR), narrative extraction (Text2Story), Bibliometrics (BIR), as well as social media personalization and search (SoMePeAS). As part of this year’s ECIR we also introduced a new CLEF session to enable CLEF organizers to report on and promote their upcoming tracks. In sum, this added to the success and diversity of ECIR and helped build bridges between communities.
The success of ECIR 2019 would not have been possible without all the help from the team of volunteers and reviewers. We wish to thank all our track chairs for coordinating the different tracks along with the teams of meta-reviewers and reviewers who helped ensure the high quality of the program. We also wish to thank the demo chairs: Christina Lioma and Dagmar Kern; student mentorship chairs: Ahmet Aker and Laura Dietz; doctoral consortium chairs: Ahmet Aker, Dimitar Dimitrov and Zeljko Carevic; workshop chairs: Diane Kelly and Andreas Rauber; tutorial chairs: Guillaume Cabanac and Suzan Verberne; industry chair: Udo Kruschwitz; publicity chair: Ingo Frommholz; and sponsorship chairs: Jochen L. Leidner and Karam Abdulahhad. We would like to thank our webmaster, Sascha Schüller and our local chair, Nina Dietzel along with all the student volunteers who helped to create an excellent online and offline experience for participants and attendees.
Published as: Advances in Information Retrieval. Proceedings of the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval Research (ECIR), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volumes 11437 and 11438, Springer, 2019
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