IR

Welcome to SIGIR, the 36th annual international ACM conference on research and development in Information Retrieval. SIGIR is the premier, international venue for research and development in information retrieval. We believe the breadth and diversity of research that comprises the program reflects the health of the organization and major future directions of the field. We are grateful to all those who submitted papers to the conference and gave the Committee an opportunity to evaluate their work for potential inclusion in the program. We are also grateful to the 50 Area Chairs and 204 general program committee members, who represent 30 countries and over 120 institutions, for all the hard work they put into evaluating submissions.

The conference received 366 full paper submissions this year. Of these, 73 (20%) were accepted, essentially the same as last year's acceptance rate and the year before. The top five countries in terms of accepted papers (according to contact author affiliation) were the U.S.A. (28), China (9), the Netherlands, Singapore, and U.K. (5 each). The top five technical areas covered by the accepted papers (as indicated by the primary keyword assigned by paper authors) were users and interactive IR (16%), search engine architecture and scalability (15%), queries and query analysis (15%), evaluation (11%), and retrieval models and ranking (11%). This represents only a slight re-ordering of topics from last year. Two hundred fifty papers were submitted to the short papers track, which represents a 20% increase in the number of submissions made to last year's poster track. Eighty-five (34%) short papers were accepted. In addition, 46 demonstrations were proposed, of which 23 (50%) were accepted. The program also consisted of 7 workshops and 10 tutorials. Finally, the Doctoral Consortium hosted 11 students this year from 10 countries and 11 institutions.

As has been customary for many years, SIGIR 2013 used a two-tier double-blind review process. In the first stage, at least three reviewers read every paper and provided ratings and comments. Papers were evaluated according to seven main criteria: relevance, originality, soundness, quality of the presentation, impact, coverage of the literature, and, for the first time, reproducibility of the results. In the second stage, the primary and secondary Area Chairs ensured the quality of the reviewing process by studying, validating, and summarizing these reviews, and adding their own feedback and ratings. Area Chairs initiated discussions among reviewers to resolve any controversial issues or significant differences of opinion. Once the discussion stage was completed, the two Area Chairs made a recommendation regarding the paper for nearly all submissions. This year we allowed Area Chairs to indicate that a paper should be accepted if room. At the program committee meeting held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the Program Chairs and the attending Area Chairs went over the reviews, verified the process, gathered additional input, and discussed and decided on papers that were balloted as accept if room, papers from which the primary Area Chair abstained and papers that had unusual score distributions. For papers that were balloted as accept if room, we especially considered the potential for the paper to provoke interesting and fruitful discussion at the conference. Ultimately 73 papers were selected for inclusion in the program.

One important change to this year's program was renaming the poster paper submission type to short papers and increasing the length of the paper from two to four pages. Short papers were presented at the conference in poster format and two separate short paper sessions were included as part of the main conference program, rather than a single event collocated with an evening reception. We believe that increasing the length of the accompanying paper allows researchers to better communicate their experiments and results, which in turn, will allow this submission type to function as a more comprehensive and substantial container for small, but significant findings. We further believe this change better allows research presented in this format to get the attention it deserves. We would like to thank the Short Paper Co-Chairs for all the extra work they did this year managing this new format and the Short Paper reviewers for the great job they did handling both the larger volume of submissions and their increased size. We believe the large increase in number of submissions to this track indicates the community's receptiveness to this change.

We hope you find this program interesting, provocative and inspiring, and that the conference provides you with a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers, practitioners and students from institutions around the world. The deadline for SIGIR 2014 is, after all, only six months away!