42nd ECIR 2020: The 1st Online IR Conference – An overview
The 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) was held on April 14–17, 2020, and brought together hundreds of researchers from all over the world. ECIR 2020 was to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, but due to the COVID-19 lockdown and travel restrictions enforced worldwide, the conference was held online. This made ECIR 2020 the […]
ECIR 2020 – The scientific programme
In total, 457 submissions were fielded across all tracks from 57 different countries — adding the papers submitted to workshops, ECIR 2020 broke the 500 submissions barrier. The final program included 55 full papers (26% acceptance rate), 48 short papers (28% acceptance rate), 10 demonstration papers (30% acceptance rate), 8 reproducibility papers (38% acceptance rate) […]
ECIR 2020 – The participants
In terms of participation, ECIR 2020 generated a very positive interest in the community. After moving to online only, a total of 1021 registrations were received. Each day of the conference featured a different highlight attracting different participants: on the first day, there was a plenary keynote session across all workshops, on the second day […]

ECIR 2020 – Delivering a virtual conference
Due to the short notice lockdown, the organization was suddenly reduced to very few people, with limited administrative support. Nevertheless, we stuck to the foreseen dates, and with only one month to carry out an entire transition to the online format, it was necessary to make many bold decisions. With an online event as the […]
ECIR 2020 – Doctorial Consortium report
The Doctoral Consortium (DC) at ECIR 2020 seems set to become a core part of the conference as for the second year running it attracted a good crowd of both submissions and attendees. The DC is a chance for early-stage PhD students in the wider area of Information Retrieval to present their work (often for […]
ECIR 2020 – Some notes on the keynotes
The European Conference on Information Retrieval https://ecir2020.org/ was originally planned to take place in Lisbon in the week after Easter. The timing for me was unfortunate as we had an important family event to attend in Glasgow. In the weeks leading up to the conference it became clear that actions being taken to mitigate the […]
ECIR 2020 – The role of knowledge in supporting IR applications
There was one very clear takeaway from ECIR 2020, a theme that to me kept occurring throughout many of the presentations at ECIR. This was the role of explicit knowledge in support applications, in particular the role of ontologies. There are many search technologies that can benefit from ontologies e.g. entity linking and recognition where […]
ECIR2020 – A view from Peru
I came across the ECIR2020 conference due to my will to learn more about search, information-seeking behaviour and information retrieval. I would like to share my experience in my first time attending such an important event. In the first place, the website was well design to facilitate people to find the registration and the structure […]
ECIR 2020 Lisbon 14-17 April
The list of accepted papers at ECIR 2020 now been published. If like me, you are interested in the Industry Day

Advances in Search: Trip Report from ECIR 2019 (Cologne, April 2019)
by Jochen L. Leidner and Ingo Frommholz SIGIR 2019 in Paris in July. This is a report of some of the highlights of ECIR this year with no claims of representativeness. Part I – Impressions and general Trends Search is alive and happy as a field of research. Both theoretical and applied papers were presented, […]
Call for Industry Day Proposals at ECIR 2017
This year’s ECIR conference will include an Industry Day, following very successful events at ECIR in recent years. The Industry Day will be held on Thursday 13th April 2017, immediately after the regular conference program. The Industry Day’s objectives are three-fold. The first objective is to present the state of the art in search and […]
Recent comments