Call for Doctoral Consortium 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 2020 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 strongly supports user, system, application, and evaluation focused papers:

  • User aspects including information interaction, contextualisation, personalisation, simulation, characterisation, and information behaviours.
  • System aspects including retrieval and recommendation algorithms, machine learning, deep learning, content representation, natural language processing, system architectures, and efficiency methods.
  • Applications such as search and recommender systems, web and social media apps, domain specific search (professional, bio, chem, etc.), novel interfaces, intelligent search agents/bots, and related innovative search tools.
  • Evaluation research including new measures and novel methods for the measurement and evaluation of users, systems and/or applications.

In addition to these traditional topic areas, ECIR 2020 will be encouraging the submissions of papers on a specialised theme (eHealth, DeepLearning, education IR etc.)

Doctoral Consortium

The ECIR 2020 Doctoral Consortium is an excellent forum for PhD students to discuss their research ideas with world-class researchers in the area of Information Retrieval.

The Doctoral Consortium (DC) will take place on 14th April 2020. During the DC session, we will have six selected student presentations, followed by discussions and individual meetings with senior researchers who are members of the DC Committee (also called mentors).

There are great opportunities for networking over lunch and later on during the day and other possible activities may be introduced according to the topics of the accepted submissions.

One submission will be awarded the “best doctoral consortium paper award”, which will be decided by the doctoral consortium committee.

Prospective candidates for the Doctoral Consortium

Students who have recently completed their research proposal, or about to do so (typically 2nd year PhD students) are welcome to submit their contribution to the consortium. The greatest benefit will be achieved for those students that have recently scoped their PhD topic in the Information Retrieval area. Candidates for the DC will be selected based on the potential of their research for future impact on the field of Information Retrieval and the likely benefit to the student of participating in the DC. The submitted paper will be the basis for detailed discussions at the DC.

Submission Guidelines

The submission may contain previously-published material, as well as ongoing work. Doctoral students who submit to the DC are welcome to submit other papers or posters to ECIR 2020. The submission has two parts. The first part, a research statement, should be no more than six (6) pages long in the LNCS format. It will be the basis for detailed discussions at the Consortium, and should include:

  • Motivation for the proposed research
  • Background and related work (including key references)
  • Description of proposed research, including main research questions
  • Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate)
  • Specific research issues for discussion at the Doctoral Consortium.

The second part, limited to one (1) page, describes benefits that would be obtained by attending the DC. It should be added as an appendix to the research statement and include:

  • A statement by the student saying why they want to attend the Consortium.
  • A brief statement (1 paragraph) by their advisor saying how the student would benefit by attending the DC. Advisors should also specifically state whether the student has written, or is close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent), and when they expect the student would defend their dissertation if they progress at a typical rate.

Format Requirements

All submissions must be written in English following the ECIR guidelines and the LNCS author guidelines and submitted electronically through EasyChair. The first page must contain the title of the paper, full author name, affiliation and contact details and an abstract of up to 250 words. Submissions will be reviewed by the members of the DC committee.

Accepted Papers

Students accepted to the Consortium will have the option of publishing a 4-page extended abstract summarizing their research in the full ECIR conference proceedings.

Key Dates

Deadline: 29 November 2019, 11:59 pm (AoE)
Notification: 10th January 2020
Doctoral Consortium: 14th April 2020

Doctoral Consortium Chairs (dc_at_ecir2020.org)

Stefan Rueger
   
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, United Kingdom

Suzan Verberne
   Leiden University, Netherlands