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Call for Full papers

The European Conference on Information Retrieval is the prime European forum for the presentation of original research in the field of Information Retrieval

ECIR 2021 is seeking high-quality and original submissions on theory, experimentation, and practice regarding the retrieval, representation, management, and usage of textual, visual and multi-modal information.

Topics of Interest

ECIR 2021 encourages the submission of high-quality and original papers on the theory, experimentation, and practice of retrieval, representation, management, and usage of textual, visual, audio, and multi-modal information. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • User aspects, including information interaction, contextualisation, personalisation, simulation, characterisation, and behaviours.
  • System and foundational aspects, including retrieval models and architectures, content analysis and classification, recommendation algorithms, query processing and ranking, efficiency and scalability.
  • Machine learning, deep learning, neural IR, natural language processing, as applied to textual, visual, audio, and multi-modal information.
  • Applications such as web search, recommender systems, web and social media apps, domain-specific search, enterprise search, novel interfaces to search tools, intelligent search, and conversational agents.
  • Evaluation research, including new measures and novel methods for the measurement and evaluation of systems, users, and/or applications.

Full Paper Track

The Full paper track provides the opportunity for researchers to present their state of the art research in Information Retrieval, which makes, or have the potential to make, a significant contribution to the field. Selected papers from ECIR 2021 will be published in a special issue of the Information Retrieval Journal in early 2022.

We are delighted to announce the ECIR Industry Impact Award, sponsored by Signal AI. It will be awarded to the authors of one selected full paper from the ECIR programme.

Industry Impact Award

ECIR 2021 will feature an “industry impact” award. The award aims to encourage IR researchers (academics and practitioners) to think about industrial impact, and hence to strengthen the connection and collaboration with industry. The award will be given to authors of one selected full paper from the ECIR programme. Factors that will be taken into account when selecting the candidate papers for this award include, but are not limited to, replicability, open source code, data availability, efficiency, simplicity and business value. In addition to receiving an award certificate, the recipients of the award will be presented with a monetary prize of €1000.

ECIR will continue to feature this award at least until 2022.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers. Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. In addition, the corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. Once the paper has been submitted, changes relating to its authorship cannot be made.

All submissions must be written in English. Authors should consult ECIR’s paper guidelines for the preparation of their papers. Useful suggestions to avoid common IR evaluation mistakes can be found in Fuhr’s and Sakai‘s papers. All papers should be submitted electronically through the conference submission system

Full papers and reproducibility track papers are up to 12 pages in length plus additional pages for references, short papers are up to 6 pages in length plus additional pages for references, and demonstration papers are 4 pages in length plus additional pages for references.

Full papers will be refereed through double-blind peer review.  Accepted full papers, will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. The proceedings will be distributed to all delegates at the conference. Accepted full papers will have to be presented at the conference – and at least one author will be required to register. ECIR intends to publish the proceedings as open access if sufficient funding is acquired.

Dual Submission Policy

Papers submitted to ECIR 2021 should be substantially different from papers that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or that are under review at other venues. Exceptions to this rule are:

  • Submission is permitted for papers presented or to be presented at conferences or workshops without proceedings.
  • Submission is permitted for papers that have previously been made available as a technical report (e.g. in institutional archives or preprint archives like arXiv). We discourage this since it places anonymity at risk. In this case, the authors should not cite the report, so as to preserve anonymity.

Important dates

Full paper submission: October 1, 2020, EXTENDED 15 October 2020 11:59 pm (AoE)

NotificationDecember 1, 2020  15 December 2020

Camera-ready copyJanuary 10, 2021 20 January 2021

Main Conference: March 28 – April 1, 2021

Program Committee Chairs:

Djoerd Hiemstra,  Radboud Universiteit, The Netherlands

Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven, Belgium

Contact: ProgramChairs@ecir2021.eu