Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2017 ACM International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval -- ICTIR'17. This year's conference continues its tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of research on theoretical aspects of Information Retrieval (IR) including (a) conceptual papers that explore key concepts, (b) theoretical papers that model concepts and/or relations between concepts, and (c) papers that study theory in experimental or industrial settings. To highlight the increasingly stronger connections between Information Retrieval and neighboring disciplines this year's conference explicitly welcomed papers in IR areas that overlap with Human Information Access, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Perception. We are also happy to welcome you to Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Netherlands has a number of strong and vibrant information retrieval groups, e.g. at the University of Amsterdam, Twente University, Radboud University Nijmegen, and Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica, and counts about 150 information retrieval researchers, the largest number per capita in worldwide. These groups are successfully engaged in both theoretical and practical work. They are young groups consisting of enthusiastic people, with a track record in high quality publications. The call for papers attracted submissions from all over the world. The program committee reviewed 97 contributions -- 54 long papers and 43 short -- and accepted 27 long papers and 25 short, all of which will be presented during the conference. We received three excellent tutorial proposals and two workshop proposals, and we hope those will aid in laying down foundational ideas in information retrieval research.