Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research & development in information retrieval

Welcome to SIGIR, the 37th annual international ACM conference on research and development in Information Retrieval, the premier international conference in the area. We acknowledge all those who submitted papers to the conference and gave the program committee an opportunity to evaluate their work for potential inclusion in the program. Huge thanks are owed to the 57 Area Chairs and 244 general program committee members, who represent 31 countries and almost 200 institutions, for their dedicated work in evaluating the submissions. The conference received 387 full paper submissions (6% increase over last year) of which 82 (21%) were accepted. This constitutes a slight increase on the acceptance rate over last year. The top five countries in terms of accepted papers (taking all author affiliations of each paper equally into account) were the U.S.A. (36%), China (18%), Singapore (9%), Israel (4%), and The Netherlands (3%). The coverage of accepted papers across topics is as follows: Document Representation and Content Analysis (13%), Queries and Query Analysis (16%), Users and Interactive IR (17%), Retrieval Models and Ranking (9%), Search Engine Architectures and Scalability (8%), Filtering and Recommending (8%), Evaluation (5%), Web IR and Social Media Search (13%), IR and Structured Data (1%), Multimedia IR (5%), Other Applications (5%). As has been customary for many years, SIGIR 2014 employed a two-tier double-blind review process. At least three reviewers reviewed each paper, and then the Primary Area Chair of the paper led a discussion, based on which (s)he wrote a meta-review. The Secondary Area Chair assigned to each paper double-checked the reviews and discussion, and in some cases, provided an additional review. The PC chairs ranked the submitted papers by the meta-review score and then by the average score of the three reviewer scores, carefully examined the reviews and associated discussion. The PC chairs first identified "clear accepts" and "clear rejects". Then the undecided papers were carefully discussed in a face-to-face PC meeting held in Amsterdam, which involved all available Area Chairs. We would like to heartily thank Jaap Kamps for his assistance in organizing the Amsterdam meeting (even mindfully keeping us on track at times!), providing necessary support materials including a dinner, all of which was greatly appreciated by those who attended the meeting. The short papers track received 263 submissions (3% increase over last year) and accepted 104 of them (40% acceptance compared to 34% last year). For the second year, the short papers are four pages long. Deep thanks to Vanessa Murdock, Gabriella Pasi and Andrew Turpin, the short paper track chairs, for their very hard and sustained work in arranging and managing a thorough review process for so many papers. The tutorial track received 17 submissions, 16 of which underwent review. Seven proposals were accepted. Thanks to Falk Scholer for managing the review process which has ensured a diverse tutorial program of excellent quality. We received 11 workshop proposals, each of which was peer-reviewed by three members of the Workshops PC, and after discussion of all submissions in the Workshops PC, the final decisions were made in consultation with the PC Chairs of the technical program. A total of 7 workshops were accepted (a 64% acceptance rate). We thank Jaap Kamps and Gabriella Kazai for their efforts in producing a great set of workshops. The Demos track received 34 submissions of which 16 were accepted. Many thanks to Paul Thomas for chairing this track and providing us with an array of interesting demos to look at. The Doctoral Consortium received 11 submissions this year of which 8 were ultimately acceptances. We are grateful to Shane Culpepper and Grace Hui Yang for chairing the consortium. This year's industry event is the SIGIR Symposium on IR in Practice (SIRIP 2014) co-chaired by Isabelle Moulinier and David Hawking. Their efforts in organizing SIRIP are gratefully acknowledged. In addition to abstracts of invited talks by industry researchers, and practitioners and consumers of IR, the SIRIP 2014 proceedings include refereed research papers with a strong industry focus (four pages). The proceedings are published separately in electronic-only format. Finally, special thanks to Mounia Lalmas for chairing the panel to select the Best Paper and Best Student Paper. This year, SIGIR has the enormous honor of hosting an ACM-W Athena award lecture to be delivered by Susan Dumais. This prestigious award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to Computer Science.