*Call for Papers* *FIRE 2024: 16th meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation* 12th - 15th December 2024 DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India *Submission Deadline: 22nd September 2024 (Extended)* Website: fire.irsi.org.in Submission Link : https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/FIRE2024 ------------------------------

The 16th meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation 2024 will be held at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar, India. It will be an in-person conference. We are seeking submissions of high-quality and original papers. Submissions will be reviewed by experts on the basis of the originality of the work, the validity of the results, chosen methodology, writing quality and the overall contribution to the field of IR/NLP. Authors are also encouraged to describe work in progress and late-breaking research results.

*Topics of interest include, but are not limited to*

1. Search and Ranking: Research on core algorithmic topics in IR: 1. Queries and query analysis (e.g., Query understanding, query reformulation, query representation etc.) 2. Retrieval models and ranking (e.g., Cross lingual IR with a particular focus on Indian languages, ranking algorithms, language models, retrieval algorithms, learning to rank etc) 3. Efficiency and scalability (e.g., distributed search, search engine architecture, indexing, crawling etc). 4. Supervised/Weakly supervised deep neural networks. 5. Other domain-specific applications of IR. 2. Evaluation: Research on evaluation of IR systems: 1. User centric evaluation (e.g., User experience, user engagement etc) 2. System centric evaluation (e.g., Evaluation metrics). 3. Query Performance Prediction and its applications. 3. Generative Models for IR/NLP. 1. Conversational and Interactive Search Systems 2. Simulated Data for Personalized IR. 3. Issues related to fairness and trustworthiness of IR/Recsys models 4. In-Context Learning or Retrieval Augmented Generation for Search and NLP downstream tasks, such as Question Answering, Summarization 5. Domain-specific generation, such as Code generation, Argument generation, Workflow generation. 4. Explainability, Fairness and Trust of IR/Recsys models 1. Explainable models for ranking, text classification/clustering, summarization etc. 2. User studies for explainable AI (XAI) applied to IR/Recsys 3. Issues related to fairness and trustworthiness of IR/Recsys models 5. Multimodal and Crossmodal IR/Recsys model 1. Visual Question Answering 2. Image search/recommendation 3. Question answering 4. Multimodal document summarization

*Important dates* *25th July 2024* Paper submission link https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/FIRE2024 will be available *5th September 2024 22nd September 2024 * Paper submission deadline *30th October 2024 * Paper acceptance notification *10th November 2024 * Camera ready copy submission deadline *12th-15th December 2024* In-person conference

Note: All submission deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE Time Zone (Anywhere on Earth).

*Submission Guidelines*

Submissions must describe substantial, original and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis must be included. If the paper being submitted is under review at any other venue, the same should be explicitly mentioned when making the submission. Such a paper, if accepted, should be withdrawn from all other places.

The FIRE conference track, this year, is subdivided into 2 different subtracks (described later), each with a different scope and objective, and with different reviewing policy. Please make sure that you are submitting your paper in the correct track. No requests for switching papers across tracks will be entertained after the deadline for paper submission expires.

Submissions will be taken through Microsoft CMT. Select the "Conference Track" while submitting the paper and in the subject area select the appropriate paper type (Regular Paper, Resource and Demo Paper, Extended Abstract). Please note that incorrect submission will be desk rejected. Link to submit the paper: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/FIRE2024

*Paper Template and Submission*

The submitted papers must follow LNCS (Springer conference) template available on https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/springer-lecture-notes-in-computer-... . The only accepted format of submissions is PDF. Papers which do not conform to the requirements may get rejected without review. Please note that it is the responsibility of the authors to ensure that the PDF submission has been uploaded successfully (we suggest that you try downloading your paper again yourself, to check). Authors are invited to submit in any of the following tracks: - *Regular paper*

Similar to last year, this year, also we don’t make any explicit distinction between long and short papers. More time will be allocated for longer papers during the presentation. Submitted papers can be of *variable length* up to a *maximum of 12* pages of *content (excluding references)* .

Reviewing policy: Double-blind.

- *Resource and Demo paper*

The papers submitted at this track should describe data or software resources towards a research problem that will be helpful to the IR/NLP/AI community. Such resources should ideally be made publicly available for reviewers to judge the merit of the resources. The demo papers should contain a link to a working software that demonstrates the application of existing research methods as a proof-of-the-concept.

Reviewing policy: Single-blind.

Number of pages: *variable length* up to a *maximum of 9* pages of *content (excluding references).*.

*Double-blind Reviewing Policy*

All submissions to the regular track of FIRE conference 2024 will be reviewed on the basis of originality, relevance, importance, and clarity. For papers submitted to the regular track, the authors must not mention their names or institutional details anywhere in the paper. Authors should refer to themselves in third person when citing their own work. Expressions like "In our earlier work..." or "We previously showed that..." must be avoided.

*Presentation Requirements*

If accepted, at least one author will have to register for the conference and present their work in-person.

*Conference Track Co-ordinator* - Debasis Ganguly (University of Glasgow, UK) - Debarshi Kumar Sanyal (Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, India)

For queries related to conference please email us at [ clia@isical.ac.in ] For latest updates subscribe the FIRE mailing List [ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fire-list ]