ECIR 2024 — Conference Report
By Graham McDonald (BCS IRSG Vice Chair and Senior Lecturer in Information Retrieval at the University of Glasgow)
The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024, https://www.ecir2024.org) was held in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, during March 24–28, 2024. The conference was organised by the University of Glasgow, in cooperation with the British Computer Society’s Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) and with assistance from the Glasgow Convention Bureau. ECIR 2024 was held at the Radisson Blu hotel in Glasgow city centre, just a couple of minutes’ walk from Glasgow’s Central railway station, and brought together over four hundred researchers from the UK, Europe and abroad.
ECIR 2024 was a fully in-person conference, with all the paper presentations being delivered live by conference delegates physically in Glasgow. This decision was well received by the community, who overwhelmingly said that the conference experience was improved by not having any pre-recorded videos or remote on-line presentations. It is great to see ECIR, and the field of information retrieval, continuing to grow and develop, with ECIR 2024 having the largest number of in-person attendees of any ECIR.
ECIR 2024 held a number of social events that were very popular with the delegates. The welcome reception was a relaxed event at the conference venue that provided a first chance to catch up with old friends, with many delegates chatting late into the night. Glasgow City Council sponsored a civic reception at the magnificent and historic Glasgow City Chambers on George Square. The City Chambers is one of the city’s most prestigious buildings and contains many examples of visual and tactile fine art. The building contains what is reputed to be the biggest marble staircase in the world (which has been featured in many films) and is said to contain “more marble than the Vatican”.
The ECIR 2024 Banquet was held at the Crowne Plaza hotel in the historic Clydeside area of Glasgow. The delegates were welcomed by a Scottish piper, who piped them into the event and officially opened the banquet after a welcoming drinks reception. Attendees enjoyed a four course Scottish-influenced dinner followed by live Scottish music and ceilidh dancing. Figure 1 shows ECIR 2024 delegates enjoying traditional Scottish dancing at the ECIR 2024 Banquet.
To help the delegates to savour the magical spirits of Glasgow, ECIR 2024 organised two guided tours of the Clydeside Whisky Distillery and the Clydeside area, with the option the visit to the nearby Riverside Transport Museum (free entry!). The weather was well behaved, and the participants enjoyed an adventure around the Clydeside and Finnieston areas of Glasgow where there are lots of good pubs, restaurants and coffee shops. Figure 2 shows some of the ECIR 2024 delegates enjoying the Clydeside Distillery tour refreshments.
The ECIR 2024 programme featured a total of 578 papers from authors in 61 countries in its various tracks. The programme included 57 full papers (23% acceptance rate), an additional 18 finding papers, 36 short papers (24% acceptance rate), 26 IR4Good papers (41% acceptance rate), 6 Industry Day papers (46% acceptance rate), 18 demonstration papers (56% acceptance rate), 9 reproducibility papers (39% acceptance rate), 8 doctoral consortium papers (57% acceptance rate), and 15 invited CLEF papers. All submissions were peer-reviewed by at least three international Programme Committee members to ensure that only submissions of the highest relevance and quality were included in the final ECIR 2024 programme. To acknowledge this, 51 reviewers received Outstanding Reviewer Awards during the awards ceremony at the ECIR 2024 Banquette. Best Paper awards and Honourable Mentions were also presented for papers in each of the conference tracks. Figure 3 shows one of the ECIR 2024 delegates presenting their work in one of the two poster sessions of the main conference.
ECIR also included ten workshops, seven tutorials and a Doctoral Consortium. The workshops brought together participants to discuss narrative extraction (Text2Story), knowledge-enhanced retrieval (KEIR), online misinformation (ROMCIR), understudied users (IR4U2), graph-based IR (IRonGraphs), open web search (WOWS), technology-assisted review (ALTARS), geographic information extraction (GeoExT), bibliometrics (BIR) and search futures (SearchFutures). The tutorials covered a range of topics including explainable recommender systems, sequential recommendation, social good applications, quantum for IR, generative IR, query performance prediction and PhD advice. For the Doctoral Consortium, eight early career PhD students were invited to present their work and interact with, and receive feedback from, allocated mentors. The students were also given space in the poster sessions of the main conference to present their work to the conference delegates.
In keeping with the tradition to evolve and grow the conference, its community and its diversity, ECIR 2024 introduced a number of novelties, including:
IR4Good: ECIR 2024 introduced a new IR4Good track to promote multidisciplinarity in addressing the societal challenges that responsible information retrieval technologies need to address. Societal issues (such as algorithmic bias and fairness, privacy, and transparency). The track presented high-quality, high-impact, original IR-related research on societal issues at the interdisciplinary level (e.g., philosophy, law, sociology, civil society). Such societal issues are becoming more and more relevant for making advances towards responsible information retrieval. Coupled with the changing legal and ethical frameworks surrounding the use of AI in the UK, USA and Europe, novel information retrieval technologies are increasingly having to address such issues, so that the technologies that underpin people’s everyday interactions with information are responsible, fair, safe to use, privacy-aware, transparent, and comprehensible to the general public. The IR4Good track featured invited talks from Burkhard Schafer (University of Edinburgh Law School) and Joseph Wilson (City of Glasgow College), as well as three sessions of paper presentations, a lively poster session, and an interdisciplinary working group session to that facilitate discussions between the diverse disciplines that took part in the day.
Collab-a-thon: ECIR 2024 also introduced a new initiative, called the “Collab-a-thon”, to support collaboration among delegates. The Collab-a-thon enabled participants with similar interests to have focused discussion and foster new collaborations that could potentially lead to exciting new research. Individual Collab-a-thon sessions were held for each of the topics addressed by the sessions in the main conference. There were many lively discussions during the Collab-a-thon sessions (helped along with some quality Scottish whisky!). A number of concrete ideas and plans for future collaborations were discussed, and then presented at a show and tell session in the main conference. All ECIR 2024 attendees were welcome and encouraged to participate in the Collab-a-thon, with a particular focus on involving PhD students and information retrieval practitioners. The Collab-a-thon will run again at ECIR 2025, and we hope that it will develop in the coming years to become a central component of ECIR. The Collab-a-thon was organised by Sean MacAvaney, with help from the local ECIR 2024 volunteers. Sean has written a summary report of the event and its outcomes for the June 2024 issue of the ACM SIGIR Forum.
Findings: ECIR 2024 introduced the first ever official Findings Track for an information retrieval conference. The ECIR 2024 Findings track followed the successful ACL model where the Findings papers were deemed to be sufficiently solid and interesting papers that did not make the acceptance rate cut-off point of the conference. Many of the papers addressed emerging topics of information retrieval, which enriched the overall technical programme of the conference and its diversity. Authors of the 18 Findings papers presented a five-minute boaster talk during the main conference as well as a poster presentation. The boaster presentations resulted in a lively session with lots of interesting ideas being promoted to the audience. The overwhelming feedback from the delegates was positive, with many people commenting that the initiative should remain a fixed feature of ECIR and hopefully also be taken up by other information retrieval conferences, such as ACM SIGIR, in the future.
KvR Award: ECIR 2024 was proud introduce a new award to the information retrieval community. The award is named after Professor Cornelis “Keith” van Rijsbergen (University of Glasgow), a pioneer in modern information retrieval, and a strong advocate of the development of models and theories in the field. The Keith van Rijsbergen (or KvR) Award recognises established researchers with a significant track record in information retrieval, that have made significant contributions to using theory to develop new information retrieval models, paradigms, concepts or metrics to advance our understanding of key aspects, problems or applications in information retrieval. The award was very well received by the community, with many people saying that the award is an important addition and some people already making suggestions about future nominations!
There was an open call for nominations. We received high calibre nominations from across the community, with all of the nominees being worthy of consideration in the next iteration of the award. An award panel independently reviewed the nominations before deciding on the awardee, and this year’s worthy recipient is:
Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam).
Maarten delivered a well-thought special keynote presentation addressing issues around explorations in transparency. Maarten is a well-known prominent figure in the community and has been at the forefront of information retrieval research for many years, advancing the interplay between theoretical frameworks and practical applications, consequently pushing the boundaries of the information retrieval domain. Congratulations Maarten! Figure 4 shows Maarten in action delivering his special keynote presentation.
ECIR 2024 had a total of eight keynote talks during the main conference and the Industry Day programmes. The main conference had three keynote presentations. Charles L. A. Clarke (University of Waterloo) opened the main conference with a keynote talk on “Evaluating Generative Information Retrieval Systems” that generated lots of lively discussions and debate between the attendees. On the second day of the conference, Josiane Mothe (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse; INSPE, Université de Toulouse) gave a fascinating keynote talk on “Shaping the Future of Endangered and Low-Resource Languages: Our Role in the Age of LLMs”. The special keynote presentation from Maarten de Rijke (winner of the 2024 Keith van Rijsbergen Award) rounded of the second day. On day three, Carlos Castillo (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) gave a thoughtful and insightful keynote talk on “Human Factors and Algorithmic Fairness” that highlighted issues of algorithmic fairness in taskbased evaluation of decision support systems in high-stakes scenarios.
The ECIR Industry Day, first introduced in ECIR 2008 in Glasgow, also had four great keynote presentations. The first keynote talk was from Ed Chi (Google) titled “The LLM Revolution: Implications from Chatbots and Tool-use to Reasoning”. The talk provided an engrossing walk through the research developments that have led to the capabilities of today’s LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard. After the coffee break, Jeff Dalton (University of Edinburgh and Bloomberg) gave a talk on “Generative AI in Finance: Automatic, Topic-based Summaries for Earnings Call Transcripts”. The third Industry Day keynote was from Mounia Lalmas (Spotify), titled “AI for Search and Recommendations — Examples from Spotify”. The talk discussed some of the recent research work conducted by Mounia and her team at Spotify, and how the research has been integrated into Spotify products. The fourth keynote was from Ben Allison (Amazon), titled “Making Decisions in Sponsored Advertising”. Ben gave an introduction to the advertising domain at Amazon and discussed recent work on decision making in ads.
The ECIR 2024 proceedings is published over six volumes of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (https://link.springer.com/conference/ecir). The accepted papers cover the state-of-the-art in information retrieval and recommender systems, from user aspects to artificial intelligence & machine learning, applications, evaluation, and new social and technical challenges. As in previous years, the ECIR 2024 programme contained a high proportion of papers with students as first authors. The ECIR 2024 organisers were delighted to be able to provide more than 30 students with support attend the conference, while taking into consideration EDI criteria.
Overall, the feedback from the ECIR 2024 delegates was exceedingly positive. Delegates enjoyed the technical programme and social events, as well as the venue infrastructure (e.g., AV and WIFI), the quality of services provided by the venue staff (e.g., daily breakfasts, lunches and catering) accounting for diverse tastes and requirements.
The success of ECIR 2024 was due to the immense efforts of a large organisation team and the enthusiastic assistance from a large group of local volunteers.
ECIR 2024 organisation team: Graham McDonald, Craig Macdonald and Iadh Ounis (General co-Chairs), Nazli Goharian and Nicola Tonellotto (Programme Committee/Full Paper Chairs), Yulan He and Aldo Lipani (Short Paper Chairs), Claudia Hauff and Hamed Zamani (Reproducibility track Chairs), Ludovico Boratto and Mirko Marras (IR4Good Track Chairs), Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio and Chiara Renso (Demo Track Chairs), Olivier Jeunen and Isabelle Moulinier (Industry Day Chairs), Yashar Moshfeghi and Gabriella Pasi. (Doctoral Consortium Chairs), Jake Lever (CLEF Labs Chair), Elisabeth Lex, Maria Maistro and Martin Potthast (Workshop Chairs), Mohammad Aliannejadi and Johanne R. Trippas (Tutorial Chairs), Sean MacAvaney (Collab-a-thon Chair), Raffaele Perego (Best Paper Awards Committee Chair), Dyaa Albakour and Eugene Kharitonov (Sponsorship Chairs), Debasis Ganguly and Richard McCreadie (Proceedings Chairs), Zaiqiao Meng and Hitarth Narvala (Local Organisation Chairs).
For a detailed report on ECIR 2024, please see the June 2024 issue of the ACM SIGIR Forum https://sigir.org/forum/.
