Purpose

It is commonly agreed that the term 'information retrieval' (IR) refers to fetching information relevant to users' information needs from recorded -- using primarily, albeit not exclusively, (generally networked) computer systems -- information. As such, IR -- building firmly on its library science roots -- has by now proved to stretch beyond information and computer sciences, reaching mathematics and linguistics, tackling and challenging new areas like physics, philosophy, sociology, or biology.

It is the broad goal of the 1st ICTIR 2009 to be the forum that reflects just this new, multi-valued meaning of IR in terms of new and original results.

The purpose of ICTIR'09 is to present, discuss, analyze and integrate new theoretical results in IR, including the traditional and already well-established fields and approaches in IR, but also welcoming new approaches coming from, e.g., physics, linguistics, biology, philosphy, and other areas. Experimental or practical results from new paradigms will be considered as well.

Call for Papers
We particularly encourage postgraduate students or postdoctoral researchers to submit papers. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the theories and formal models of the following areas:

Foundations

• Mathematical Foundations of IR
• Probabilistic, Logical and Language Models
• Models based on Quantum Mechanics
• Information, meaning, content, entropy
• Properties and structures in IR
• IR architectures: peer-to-peer, distributed IR, grid
• Content representation and indexing
• Algorithms, complexity
• New approaches to IR

Wider context

• Philosophy of IR
• Sociology of IR
• Pedagogy of IR
• Linguistics of IR

Techniques

• Evaluation methodologies, test collections, metrics
• User modelling and user interactions
• Context issues
• Browsing, semantic search, meta-search
• Bibliometrics for IR and citation analysis
• Social networks and media, on-line community analysis
• Social tagging
• Machine learning
• Visualization

Applications

• Web IR
• Enterprise search
• Expert search
• Interactive IR
• Text Mining
• Digital Libraries
• XML retrieval
• Multimedia retrieval
• Domain-specific IR (blog, legal, biomedical, book, etc.)
• Recommender systems
• Filtering
• Semantic Web, Ontologies
• Mobile IR

Important Dates

Paper submission: 17 April 2009
Poster submission: 1 May 2009
Acceptance/rejection notification: 15 June 2009
Submission of camera-ready copy: 1 July 2009
Conference: 10-11 September 2009
Networking event: 12 September 2009