EVENT REPORTReport on the 19th French Conference onInformation Retrieval and Applications(CORIA-2024)
Liana Ermakova
HCTI, Université de Bretagne Occidentale
Franceliana.ermakova@univ-brest.fr

Philippe Mulhem

Antoine DoucetUniversité Grenoble Alpes, Inria, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG
FranceLa Rochelle UniversitéFranceCarlos-Emiliano Gonzalez-GallardoSébastien Fournier

La Rochelle UniversitéFranceAix Marseille Université, CNRS, LIS
FranceAbstract
We present here a short report on the French Information Retrieval Conference CORIA 2024,
held in La Rochelle, France, on the 3rd and 4th of April 2024. We describe the objectives ofthe CORIA and provide an overview of the event, the submissions, and the keynotes.
Date: 3–4 April 2024.
Website: http://coria.asso-aria.org/2024/.

1Introduction

Founded in 2004 by the French Association for Information Retrieval and Applications ARIA
(Association Francophone de Recherche d’Information et Applications), the French Information
Retrieval Conference CORIA (COnférence en Recherche d’Information et Applications) is themain francophone conference in Information and Application Research.
The 19th edition was held on 3 and 4 April 2024 alongside the 17th RJCRI meeting (Rencontredes Jeunes Chercheur.euse.s en RI) by the Images et Contenus du Laboratoire Informatique,Image, Interaction (L3i) team from La Rochelle Université. Overall, the organization and programcommittees of CORIA 2024 were composed of 30 researchers from the French community.
CORIA aims to bring together teams and individuals carrying out scientific work in the field ofinformation search and its applications: information search on the web, social networks or specific

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collections, recommendation systems, document, image, audio and video mining, personal assistants and chatbots, etc. Now a daily activity for the general public, information search is essential
to many uses of digital technology. The associated scientific and technological activity continues
to grow, interacting with other areas of computer science and other disciplines - mathematics,
linguistics, cognitive science - as well as with industry and stakeholders in the internet, media,culture, health, and education. Recent models include machine learning, data mining, natural
language processing, speech and signal processing, image analysis, and affective computing.
The CORIA conference is open to the entire international scientific community concernedwith information search from both a theoretical and applications point of view. CORIA’s target
audience is academic researchers, including master’s and doctoral students, industrialists, and all
specialists in the field. All CORIA publications are published in open access on the ARIA website
and are indexed by DBLP.

2Submissions

One role of a national conference is to allow interactions and discussions among the national
research community. The outcomes may be collaborations and joint project submissions. Suchnational conferences must be organized in a way to strengthen the community.
CORIA suffers from several years of difficulty in attracting submissions. The reasons for thatare multiple, but the major one is that national conferences are not considered in the recruitment
and evaluation process of researchers. Then, it is very hard to convince the French community
to spend time submitting its work. After many discussions within the French Association for
Information Retrieval and Applications ARIA, in 2024 the decision was made to allow, in addition
to traditional short and long papers, summary abstracts submissions. Such abstracts (2 pages +references) can be a summarized translation of a previously published paper, a report on negativeresults, a position paper, or a description of an ongoing research project. In fact, the aim of
the conference is to encourage as many meetings as possible between researchers in order toincrease collaboration and maximize interactions. Abstracts of already published articles were
not anonymized and evaluated by two members of the program committee. The original article
must be indicated to avoid any ambiguity. Other submissions were evaluated by at least threereviewers.
With these choices, we were able to get, overall, 31 submissions : 4 long papers (13%), 9 shortpapers (29%), and 18 abstracts (58%). The authors are mainly from France, but a few of themwere from abroad: Canada, Mexico, and Singapore. Regarding the number of submissions andthe large proportion of abstracts, the choice of allowing such abstracts clearly boosted the amountof submissions this year. For CORIA 2025, such abstract paper submissions will also be proposed.
The submissions were organized in the following sessions: neural information retrieval, trustworthiness and LLMs in IR, evaluation, information extraction for IR, domain-specific applications, and interactive and multimedia IR. Consistently with what is happening in the maininternational conferences in IR, the majority of the sessions did contain papers that used deeplearning approaches, especially transformer-based ones.

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3Keynotes

Two keynote talks were presented at CORIA 2024:
 “Have a better understanding of language models and the texts they produce”, by Benoı̂t
Sagot, from Inria Research Director in Automatic Language Processing and ComputationalLinguistics.
 “Europeana – challenges, progress and perspectives for a European access service for cultural
heritage collections”, by Antoine Isaac, R&D manager at Europeana Foundation, Netherlands.

The talk of Benoı̂t Sagot did outline the need for a deep understanding of deep transformerbased models as they tend to produce vector representations that are not isotropically distributedin space. This anisotropy is related to the way in which these models are learned, which leads totoken frequency dominating their representation negatively affecting the training of small models.
Avoiding the undesirable effects of this prevalence of frequency information leads to multiple
positive consequences, including on the model’s downstream performance. He also presented
some results on the detectability of LLM-generated content and showed the importance of agood understanding of how language models work to enable their optimal use, including retrievalaugmented generation and machine translation.
From a very different point of view, the talk of Antoine Isaac showed how real-world applications that use Information Retrieval face problems that the academic community does not always
consider. He presented the Europeana search engine which aims to make digitized cultural heritage
from thousands of museums, libraries, and archives across Europe accessible to a wide audience.
Both these presentations generated many questions and discussions from the audience. Given
their relevance, the audiovisual team of the Information System Department of La Rochelle Université, respecting the right of publicity of the speakers, recorded and published both talks.1

4

Focus on Young Researchers

The CORIA conference lasted two full days, the 3rd and 4th of April 2024. As we mentioned
earlier, the intent of CORIA is to gather together and to make live the community. So, oneconcern is about building also the community of junior IR French researchers. To achieve that,the young researchers’ party RJRCI was organized the evening before CORIA: the moment wasideal for meeting colleagues in an informal setting and bonding around games and drinks before
the official start of the conference.
The CORIA conference also rewards works achieved by young researchers. Two students’papers were awarded in 2024:
 Soëlie Lerch, Patrice Bellot, Emmanuel Bruno and Elisabeth Murisasco,“EMOLIS App etDataset pour suggérer des dessins animés proches émotionnellement”.
 Pierre Erbacher, Jian-Yun Nie, Philippe Preux et Laure Soulier, “PAQA: Vers des systèmesProActifs face aux Questions Ambigües”.
1

https://videos.univ-lr.fr/sciences-technologies-sante/coria-rjcri-2024/

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5Conclusion, Open Challenges and Suggestions for Future Editions

CORIA 2024 was a success, 55 participants had the opportunity to present, attend, and exchangewith the French Information Retrieval community. In such national conferences, the challengeof receiving submissions is recurrent. As we described above, we were able to get a significant
amount of papers submitted, because we allowed abstract submissions. We believe that this may
be one solution for the national conferences to survive. Such possibility of abstracts seems then agood idea, however, it is only doable in non-English-language national countries. We also suggest
to include more young researchers in the organization of the conferences.
We observed that overall, LLMs have significantly contributed to bringing NLP and IR closer
together, resulting in an increasing number of submissions on the intersection of these areas.

Acknowledgements
This edition of CORIA and RJCRI obtained public and private funding in addition to the financial
support provided by ARIA. The internal entities providing funding were la Rochelle Université, theL3i laboratory, and the IUT of la Rochelle; whereas, at a regional level, the Charente Maritime
Department of France. The private enterprises that supported financially this edition of theconference were ITESOFT, SHIFT, and Yooz. We would like to thank the organizers, volunteers,authors, PC members, and all other people who made the conference a success.

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