Introduction

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Topics

• General Topics
• HCI and IR
• Multi-Media IR

Submissions

Dates & Deadlines

Contact

Program Committee

Cooperating Societies:

Introduction

The Twenty-Second Annual International ACM-SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, will be held on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, August 15-19, 1999, with accommodation at nearby hotels.

SIGIR is the major international forum for the presentation of new research results, and for the demonstration of new systems and techniques, in information retrieval. The conference attracts a broad range of professionals including theoreticians, developers, publishers, researchers, educators, and designers of systems, interfaces, information bases, and related applications. Note that, in cooperation with ACM SIGIR, the Digital Libraries 99 conference will take place at Berkeley directly before SIGIR 99.

In 1999, in addition to the standard core set of information retrieval topics, SIGIR strongly encourages contributions from two major areas -- Human Computer Interaction in Information Access and Multi-Media Retrieval.

Mailing List

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Topics

SIGIR'99 seeks original contributions in the broad field of information storage and retrieval, covering the handling of all types of information, user behavior in information systems, and theories, models, and implementations of IR systems. A list of categories describing a wide variety of topics relevant to SIGIR can be found here. Topics traditionally relevant to SIGIR include but are not limited to:

General Topics

• IR Theory including statistical and logical IR models, data fusion.
• Experimentation: test collections, evaluation measures, experimental design, testing methodology, scalability.
• Systems and Implementation Issues: integration with database systems, networked systems and the internet, compression, efficient query evaluation.
• Natural Language Processing: word sense disambiguation, discourse analysis, and summarization for the purposes of IR; cross-lingual IR systems, dialog management, use of linguistic resources for IR.
• Filtering, Routing, and Text Classification.
• Applications: task-embedded IR, electronic publishing, digital libraries, text data mining.

HCI and IR

There is a growing opinion in the Information Retrieval community that a key to improving information access systems is to focus attention on the human-computer interface. Additionally, the World Wide Web is opening up new opportunities for design, dissemination and evaluation of user interfaces for information access.

The IR community has much to learn from the HCI community; conversely IR research has for many years investigated user needs and user information seeking behavior, typically in the context of online bibliographic systems. Thus the HCI community can benefit from this experience in the design of WWW interfaces.

One goal of SIGIR'99 is to bring these two communities closer together. Thus, human computer interaction in information retrieval will be a major theme for SIGIR'99. Topic relevant to the intersection of HCI and IR include, but are not limited to:

• Evaluation of human-computer interfaces for information access.
• Information seeking models and user interfaces for information access.
• Information structure for navigation and search.

These are described in more detail in the HCI and IR supplement.

Multi-Media Information Retrieval

A second major theme for SIGIR'99 is Multi-Media Information Retrieval. As increasing amounts of non-text material are being stored on-line, providing efficient and effective ways of finding and accessing these materials is becoming a critical problem. We are soliciting original contributions that address the information retrieval questions raised when substantial quantities of images, graphics, speech, audio, and video are to be stored on-line and made available for search and retrieval.

The Multi-Media Information Retrieval Theme of SIGIR'99 specifically addresses the overlap between multi-media data and information retrieval, and so we discourage contributions that focus purely on algorithms for processing multi-media data without regard for the information retrieval problems being addressed. We also discourage contributions that focus only on the system and software aspects of storing and managing large amounts of these data types.

We welcome high-quality papers that describe evaluation experiments, case studies, and theoretical analyses. We especially encourage submissions from researchers not traditionally part of the SIGIR community who are nevertheless doing significant information retrieval work. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Content-based Indexing Strategies
• Query Formulation and Query Languages for MMIR
• Cross-Media and Mixed-Media Retrieval
• Results Analysis and Presentation for MMIR
• Test Collection Development and Evaluation for MMIR
• See Multi-Media IR for more information about relevant topics.

These are described in more detail in the Multi-Media and IR supplement.

Submission Requirements

Submissions to SIGIR'99 may be research papers or posters, or proposals for demonstrations, panels, tutorials, or workshops. See the Submissions Page for more information.

Important Dates and Deadlines (all dates 1999)

January 12	Paper Submissions due
February 15	Tutorial, panel, and workshop proposals due
April 9	Notification of acceptance of papers
May 1	Poster submissions due
May 1	Demonstration submissions due
August 15-19	SIGIR Conference

Contact Information

General Chair:	Fredric Gey gey@ucdata.berkeley.edu UC Data Archive University of California 2538 Channing Way, # 5100 Berkeley, CA, USA 94720-5100 510.642.6571 510.643.8292 fax
Program Committee Co-Chairs:	Marti Hearst hearst@sims.berkeley.edu SIMS UC Berkeley 102 South Hall #4600 Berkeley, CA, USA 94720-4600 510.642.8016 510.642.5814 fax	Richard Tong rtong@tcc.com Tarragon Consulting Corp. 1563 Solano Ave, #350 Berkeley, CA, USA 94707 510.526.7991 510.524.5622 fax
Tutorials and Panels Chair:	Susan T. Dumais sdumais@microsoft.com Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way Redmond WA, 98052-6399, USA 425.936.8049 425.936.7329 fax
Posters Chair:	Elizabeth Liddy liddy@syr.edu
Workshops Chair:	Norbert Fuhr fuhr@ls6.informatik.uni-dortmund.de
Demos Chair:	Ray Larson ray@sims.berkeley.edu
Treasurer:	Paul Thompson thompson@research.westlaw.com
Publicity Chair:	Jamie Callan callan@cs.umass.edu