EVENT REPORT

Report on the 46th European Conference on
Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024)
Graham McDonald

Craig Macdonald

Iadh Ounis

University of Glasgow
Scotland, UK

University of Glasgow
Scotland, UK

University of Glasgow
Scotland, UK

graham.mcdonald@glasgow.ac.uk

craig.macdonald@glasgow.ac.uk

iadh.ounis@glasgow.ac.uk

Abstract
The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024) was held in Glasgow,
Scotland, during 24th -28th March 2024. The conference brought together over four hundred
researchers from the UK, Europe and abroad. ECIR 2024 was a fully in-person conferencewith a total of 417 attendees, the largest number of in-person attendees of any ECIR. The
conference received over 700 submissions, not including submissions to the workshops (280
Full Paper and 184 Short paper submissions). ECIR 2024 introduced a number of novelties,
including a new Findings track, an IR4Good track, a new innovation called the “Collab-athon” to foster collaborations within the community, and the Keith van Rijsbergen Award
to recognise researchers who have made significant contributions in using theory to advancethe field of information retrieval. This report details the conference programme and events.
Date: 24–28 March 2024.
Website: https://www.ecir2024.org.

1

Overview

The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024) was held in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, during March 24–28, 2024. The conference was held at the Radisson Blu hotel in
Glasgow city center, just a couple of minutes walk from Glasgow’s Central railway station, andbrought together over four hundred researchers from the UK, Europe and abroad. ECIR 2024
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. The success of ECIR 2024 was due to the immense efforts of a large organisation
team, listed in Table 1, and the enthusiastic assistance from a large groups of local volunteers,some of whom are pictured in Figure 1.
In keeping with the tradition to evolve and grow the conference, its community and its diversity,
ECIR 2024 introduced a number of novelties. First, ECIR 2024 included for the first time a
new “Findings” track, which was offered to some full papers that were deemed to be solid, butwhich could not make the main conference track. Second, ECIR 2024 ran a new special IR4Good
track that presented high-quality, high-impact, original IR-related research on societal issues (such
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Role

Name

Affiliation

General Chairs

Graham McDonald
Craig Macdonald
Iadh Ounis
Programme Committee Chairs
Nazli Goharian
Nicola Tonellotto
Short Paper Chairs
Yulan He
Aldo Lipani
Reproducibility Paper Chairs
Claudia Hauff
Hamed Zamani
IR for Good Chairs
Ludovico Boratto
Mirko Marras
Demo Chairs
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio
Chiara Renso
CLEF Labs Chair
Jake Lever
Workshop Chairs
Martin Potthast
Elisabeth Lex
Maria Maistro
Tutorial Chairs
Mohammad Aliannejadi
Johanne R. Trippas
Industry Day Chairs
Olivier Jeunen
Isabelle Moulinier
Doctoral Consortium Chairs
Gabriella Pasi
Yashar Moshfeghi
Collab-a-thon Chair
Sean MacAvaney
Best Paper Awards Committee Chair Raffaele Perego
Sponsorship Chairs
Dyaa Albakour
Eugene Kharitonov
Proceeding Chairs
Richard McCreadie
Debasis Ganguly
Local Organisation Chairs
Zaiqiao Meng
Hitarth Narvala

University of Glasgow
University of Glasgow
University of Glasgow
Georgetown University
University of Pisa
King’s College London
University College London
Spotify & TU Delft
University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Cagliari
University of Cagliari
Università Degli Studi di Padova
ISTI - CNR
University of Glasgow
Leipzig University
Graz University of Technology
University of Copenhagen
University of Amsterdam
RMIT University
ShareChat
Thomson Reuters
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
University of Strathclyde
University of Glasgow
ISTI-CNR
Signal AI
GoogleUniversity of Glasgow
University of Glasgow
University of Glasgow
University of Glasgow

Table 1. ECIR 2024 Organisers.

as algorithmic bias and fairness, privacy, and transparency) at the interdisciplinary level (e.g.,philosophy, law, sociology, civil society), which go beyond the purely technical perspective that is
typically addressed in the main conference. Third, ECIR 2024 featured a new innovation called
the “Collab-a-thon” to provide an opportunity for participants to foster new collaborations that
could lead to exciting new research, and forge lasting relationships with like-minded researchers.
Finally, ECIR 2024 introduced a new award to encourage and recognise established information
retrieval researchers who have made significant contributions in using theory to advance the fieldand extend its boundaries. The award was named after Professor Cornelis “Keith” van Rijsbergen(University of Glasgow), a pioneer in modern information retrieval and a strong advocate of thedevelopment of models and theories in information retrieval.

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Figure 1. ECIR 2024 local volunteers.

The ECIR 2024 programme featured a total of 578 papers from authors in 61 countries in its
various tracks.1 The final programme included 57 full papers (23% acceptance rate), an additional
18 finding papers, 36 short papers (24% acceptance rate), 26 IR4Good papers (41% acceptancerate), 6 Industry Day papers (46% acceptance rate), 18 demonstration papers (56% acceptancerate), 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 threeinternational Programme Committee members to ensure that only submissions of the highest relevance and quality were included in the final ECIR 2024 programme. The acceptance decisions were
further informed by discussions among the reviewers for each submitted paper, led by a Senior
Programme Committee member. Each track had a final PC meeting where final recommendations
were discussed and made, trying to reach a fair and equal outcome for all submissions. Reviewing
all of the submitted papers required an immense effort from the Programme Committee. To acknowledge this, 51 reviewers received Outstanding Reviewer Awards during the awards ceremony
at the ECIR 2024 Banquette.
The ECIR 2024 proceedings is published over six volumes of the Springer Lecture Notes in
Computer Science series [Goharian et al., 2024a,b,c,d,e,f]. The accepted papers cover the state-ofthe-art in information retrieval and recommender systems: user aspects, system and foundational
aspects, artificial intelligence & machine learning, applications, evaluation, new social and technical challenges, and other topics of direct or indirect relevance to search and recommendation. As
in previous years, the ECIR 2024 programme contained a high proportion of papers with students
as first authors, as well as papers from a variety of universities, research institutes, and commercialorganisations.
In total, ECIR 2024 attracted 417 in-person attendees. It is great to see that ECIR and the fieldof information retrieval are continuing to grow and develop, with ECIR 2024 having the largest
number of in-person attendees of any ECIR. Moreover, ECIR 2024 was a fully in-person conference,1

www.ecir2024.org/accepted-papers

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Figure 2. ECIR 2024 Civic Reception at Glasgow City Chambers.

with all of the papers presentations being delivered live by conference delegates physically in
Glasgow. The decision to hold ECIR 2024 in-person was well received by the community, who
overwhelmingly told us that the conference experience was improved by not having any prerecorded videos or remote on-line presentations. To the best of our knowledge, only three people
could not attend ECIR 2024 due to visa issues. However, there were a small number of presenters,
particularly workshop authors, that were not able to attend for other reasons. In such cases, if
none of the co-authors were able to attend, we worked with the corresponding authors to identify aproxy presenter that was familiar with the area of research and who could deliver the presentation.
We also checked that the proxy presenter met with the author to practice the presentation and be
ready to answer questions about the work. For workshop authors that could not attend, workshop
organisers were given leeway to use a live online delivery option.
The ECIR 2024 conference schedule was provided by ClearEvent,2 which was accessible byattendees across a variety of personal devices and linked to from the conference website. This was
the same scheduling platform that was used for ECIR 2023 and the feedback from attendees wasthat it was a lightweight solution that was easily navigable to quickly find session information.
The organisers of ECIR 2024 were delighted to be able to provide student support provision
to assist >30 students to attend the conference. EDI criteria were considered when awarding2

https://clearevent.com

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Figure 3. Traditional Scottish dancing at the ECIR 2024 banquet.

student support, and the provided support ranged from conference passport registration costs tofull travel and registration support.
Overall, the feedback from the delegates was exceedingly positive. Delegates enjoyed thetechnical 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.

2

Social Events

ECIR 2024 held three social events during the conference and also organised two whisky distillery
tours that were very popular with delegates. The ECIR 2024 welcome reception was held at theconference venue, the Radisson Blu Hotel, on Sunday 24th March. It was a relaxed event with
finger food and refreshments, and provided a first chance to catch up with old friends. Manydelegates chose to stay beyond the planned duration of the event, chatting late into the night.
Glasgow City Council sponsored a civic reception on Monday 25th March at the magnificent andhistoric Glasgow City Chambers on George Square. The event was hosted by Bailie Anthony
Carroll on behalf of the Lord Provost of Glasgow. Glasgow 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

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Figure 4. Professor Maarten de Rijke receiving the Keith van Rijsbergen Award 2024.

in many films) and is said to contain “more marble than the Vatican”. The reception included
a large buffet banquet and various drinks. Figure 2 shows the ECIR 2024 delegates enjoying thewonderful surroundings, atmosphere and refreshments.
The ECIR 2024 Banquet was held on Tuesday 26th March in the Argyll Suite of the Crowne
Plaza hotel, situated in the historic Clydeside area of Glasgow. The delegates were welcomedby a traditional 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,
including haggis, followed by some live Scottish music and lively ceilidh dancing. Figure 3 showssome of the ECIR 2024 delegates enjoying the festivities.
To help the delegates to savour the magical spirits of Glasgow, we organised two guided toursof the Clydeside Whisky Distillery, and the Clydeside area of Glasgow (Saturday 23rd and Friday
29th of March). There was also the option the visit to the nearby Riverside Transport Museum(free entry!). The weather was well behaved for us on both of the days and the participants
enjoyed an adventure around the Clydeside and Finnieston areas of Glasgow where there are lotsof good pubs, restaurants and coffee shops.

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3

Keith van Rijsbergen Award 2024

ECIR 2024 was proud to have introduced a new award to the information retrieval community.3 As
we have previously mentioned, the award is named after Professor Cornelis “Keith” van Rijsbergen(University of Glasgow), a pioneer in modern information retrieval, and a strong advocate of thedevelopment of models and theories in the field. Keith has also been recognised for his mentorshipof a large number of researchers, many of whom have gone on to contribute significantly to theinformation retrieval community.
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 todevelop new information retrieval models, paradigms, concepts or metrics to advance our understanding of key aspects, problems or applications in information retrieval. The recipient of theaward received a trophy, a cash prize of £500 plus expenses to attend and give a special celebratory
keynote presentation at ECIR 2024.
There was an open call for nominations. We received five nominations from across the community, with all of the nominees being of a high caliber and certainly worthy of consideration in
the next iteration of the award. The six members of the award panel, Iadh Ounis (Representing
ECIR), Nicola Tonellotto (Full Paper PC co-Chair), Yulan He (Short Paper PC co-Chair), Claudia Hauff (Reproducibility PC co-Chair), Graham McDonald (BCS IRSG Vice Chair) and Craig
Macdonald (Representing University of Glasgow, where Keith retired), independently reviewed
and ranked the nominations before meeting to discuss and agree on the awardee.
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!
This year’s worthy recipient is:
Keith van Rijsbergen Award 2024 Winner
Maarten de Rijke(University of Amsterdam)
Figure 4 shows Maarten receiving his award. After the presentation, Maarten delivered a wellthought keynote talk addressing issues around explorations in transparency. Maarten discussed
many interesting aspects concerning technology and transparency, with a central message thata system needs to be understood to be governed. 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!

4

IR4Good

Societal issues (such as algorithmic bias and fairness, privacy, and transparency) are becoming
more and more relevant for making advances towards responsible information retrieval. Coupledwith the changing legal and ethical frameworks surrounding the use of AI in the UK, USA andEurope, novel information retrieval technologies are increasingly having to address such societal
3

www.ecir2024.org/keith-van-rijsbergen-award

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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.
Indeed, addressing these matters will require coordinated responses at an interdisciplinary level(e.g., philosophy, law, sociology, civil society), that go beyond the purely technical perspective.
To help to address such issues, ECIR 2024 introduced a new IR4Good track4 in order to promote multidisciplinarity and address the societal challenges that responsible information retrieval
technologies need to address. 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 and a lively poster session. The IR4Good track also incorporated an interdisciplinary working group session that facilitated discussions between the diverse
disciplines that took part in the day. Involving diverse communities in such discussion is essential
to the further development of responsible information retrieval technologies.
We received overwhelmingly positive feedback about the IR4Good track from the ECIR 2024
attendees. We hope to see this initiative continued at ECIR 2025 and beyond, as there is no doubtthat the issues that the IR4Good track aims to address will continue to be even more prevalentand important within society in the years to come.

5

Findings Track

ECIR 2024 introduced the first ever official Findings Track for an information retrieval conference.
There has been a lot of discussion in the community about the benefits of including Findings papers
in information retrieval conferences, in order to increase the diversity of the programme and to
reduce possible variability of decisions concerning borderline papers. 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 cutoff point of the conference.
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 ofinteresting ideas being promoted to the audience. We received great feedback from the delegates
about the contents of the papers and their presentations. Many of the papers addressed emerging
topics of information retrieval, which enriched the overall technical programme of the conference
and its diversity. The overwhelming feedback from the delegates was positive, with many peoplecommenting 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.

6

Collab-a-thon

ECIR 2024 also introduced a new initiative to support collaboration among delegates, called
the “Collab-a-thon”.5 The motivation behind this innovation was to enable participants withsimilar interests to get together and hopefully foster new collaborations that could potentiallylead to exciting new research. The Collab-a-thon provided an opportunity for participants to havefocused discussions about particular information retrieval topics during the conference. There was4
5

www.ecir2024.org/ir4good
www.ecir2024.org/collab-a-thon

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a separate Collab-a-thon session held for each of the topics addressed by the sessions 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. There
were many lively discussions during the Collab-a-thon sessions (helped along with some quality
Scottish whisky!) and a number of concrete ideas and plans for future collaborations were discussed. The conference programme also included a show and tell session in the main conference
presenting some of the collaborative outcomes of the various Collab-a-thon sessions. Indeed, theeven turned out to be a significant success with many interesting outcomes.
The Collab-a-thon was organised by Sean MacAvaney, with help from a number of the local
volunteers. Organising the Collab-a-thon was a significant effort as it required continuous interactions and engagements with the participants. Sean has written a summary report of the event
and its outcomes for the ACM SIGIR Forum. The Collab-a-thon will run again at ECIR 2025,
and we hope and expect that it will develop in the coming years to become a central componentof ECIR.

7

Keynote Talks

ECIR 2024 had a total of eight keynote talks during the main conference and the Industry Day
programmes. The main conference had three keynote presentations6 that we provide an overview
of in Section 7.1, and a special keynote presentation from the winner of the Keith van RijsbergenAward, that we previously discussed in Section 3. The Industry day7 also had four great keynote
presentations that we discuss in Section 7.2.

7.1

Main Conference Keynote Presentations

Evaluating Generative Information Retrieval Systems
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.
Abstract: Traditionally, information retrieval systems have been evaluated with a combinationof implicit feedback from user interactions, explicit user feedback, and paid assessment by humanlabellers. Over the past year, both academic researchers and commercial services have begun
to employ large language models to replace and augment human assessment for IR evaluation.
Over the same period, generative information retrieval (Gen-IR) systems and retrieval augmented
generation (RAG) systems have emerged as alternatives to traditional IR systems. The role of IR
evaluation has always been to answer questions like, “Is this system better than that one?” and“Does this search result satisfy the searcher’s information need?” In a world where large language
models can outperform human labellers on basic relevance assessment tasks, and where the resultsof a search are used only as input to a generative system, how do we answer these questions, andare these even the right questions to ask? While we can now build systems we could only dream6
7

www.ecir2024.org/keynote-speakers
www.ecir2024.org/industry-day

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about a few years ago, we still need to know if changes to a system reflect genuine benefits to its
users. In this talk, I will survey the landscape as it exists in March 2024, and talk about directions
forward.
Shaping the Future of Endangered and Low-Resource Languages: Our Role in theAge of LLMs
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”.
Abstract: Isidore of Seville is credited with the adage that it is language that gives birth toa people, and not the other way around, underlining the profound role played by language inthe formation of cultural and social identity. Today, of the more than 7100 languages listed, asignificant number are endangered. Since the 1970s, linguists, information seekers and enthusiasts
have helped develop digital resources and automatic tools to support a wide range of languages,
including endangered ones. The advent of Large Language Model (LLM) technologies holds bothpromise and peril. They offer unprecedented possibilities for the translation and generation ofcontent and resources, key elements in the preservation and revitalisation of languages. They alsopresent threat of homogenisation, cultural oversimplification and the further marginalisation of
already vulnerable languages. This talk proposes an initiatory journey, exploring the potential
paths and partnerships between technology and tradition, with a particular focus on the Occitan
language. Occitan is a language from Southern France, parts of Spain and Italy that played amajor cultural and economic role, particularly in the Middle Ages. It is now endangered according
to UNESCO. This talk critically examines how human expertise and artificial intelligence can work
together to offer hope for preserving the linguistic diversity that forms the foundation of our global
and especially our European heritage while addressing some of the ethical and practical challenges
that accompany the use of these powerful technologies.
Human Factors and Algorithmic Fairness
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.
Abstract: In this talk, we present ongoing research on human factors of decision support systems
that has consequences from the perspective of algorithmic fairness. We study two different settings:
a game and a high-stakes scenario. The game is an exploratory “oil drilling” game, while the highstakes scenario is the prediction of criminal recidivism. In both cases, a decision support system
helps a human make a decision. We observe that in general users of such systems must threada fine line between algorithmic aversion (completely disregarding the algorithmic support) andautomation bias (completely disregarding their own judgment). The talk presents joint work led
by David Solans and Manuel Portela.

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7.2

Industry Day Keynote Presentations

The industry day was first introduced in ECIR 2008 in Glasgow, and it was an innovation within
the information retrieval community at that time. The initiative was designed to foster interactions
between information retrieval academics and practitioners and has since become a fixture of ECIR
and other information retrieval conferences. As usual, the industry day of ECIR 2024 featured avery strong programme of speakers and was very well attended. While it had a strong industry
flavour, all of the talks also had strong research components and were thoughtful contributions on
a number of emerging information retrieval topics. The day featured six paper presentations andfour keynotes speakers.
The first keynote talk was from Ed Chi (Google) titled “The LLM Revolution: Implications
from Chatbots and Tool-use to Reasoning”. The talk provided a engrossing walk through theresearch developments that have led to the capabilities of today’s LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard:
generating text that is nearly indistinguishable from human-written text, translating languages
with amazing accuracy, and answering questions in an informative way. 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 talk discussed important challenges for the real-world deployment of generative LLMs in the financial industry at
Bloomberg.
The third Industry Day keynote was from Mounia Lalmas (Spotify), titled “AI for Searchand 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 talk described the role that search and recommendation technologies playin improving the users’ search experience. The fourth keynote presentation was from Ben Allison(Amazon), titled “Making Decisions in Sponsored Advertising”. Ben gave an introduction to theadvertising domain at Amazon and discussed recent work on decision making in ads: learning
to bid, and learning to conduct auctions. The talk also provided many interesting insights into
how Amazon combine machine learning, counterfactual reasoning and optimized decision making
with strategyproof-ness, and highlighted opportunities for exciting new work at the intersectionof multiple disciplines.

8

Best Paper Awards

The ECIR 2024 Best Paper Awards Committee consisted of: Raffaele Perego (ISTI-CNR), Ophir
Frieder (Georgetown University), Min Zhang (Tsinghua University), Maria Soledad Pera (TU
Delft), Fabrizio Silvestri (Sapienza Università di Roma) and Pablo Castells (Universidad Autónoma
de Madrid). The committee received a short-list of candidate papers from the individual track
chairs. The candidate papers were all evaluated independently and a winner and an honorable
mention were awarded for each track. The Industry Day and IR4Good chairs selected the best
paper awards for their respective tracks.
Full Paper Award: Nachshon Cohen, Hedda Cohen Indelman, Yaron Fairstein and Guy Kushilevitz, InDi: Informative and Diverse Sampling for Dense Retrieval [Cohen et al., 2024]

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Full Paper Honourable Mention: Shubham Chatterjee, Iain Mackie and Jeff Dalton, DREQ:
Document Re-ranking Using Entity-Based Query Understanding [Chatterjee et al., 2024]
Full Paper Honourable Mention: Eugene Yang, Dawn J. Lawrie, James Mayfield, Douglas
W. Oard and Scott Miller, Translate-Distill: Learning Cross-Language Dense Retrieval by
Translation and Distillation [Yang et al., 2024]
Short Paper Award: Weronika Lajewska and Krisztian Balog, Towards Reliable and Factual
Response Generation: Detecting Unanswerable Questions in Information-Seeking Conversations [Lajewska and Balog, 2024]
Short Paper Honourable Mention: Abbas Saleminezhad, Negar Arabzadeh, Soosan Beheshti
and Ebrahim Bagheri, Context-Aware Query Term Difficulty Estimation for Performance
Prediction [Saleminezhad et al., 2024]
Demo Paper Award: Rúben Almeida, Hugo Sousa, Luı́s Cunha, Nuno Guimarães, Ricardo
Campos and Alı́pio Jorge, Physio: An LLM-Based Physiotherapy Advisor [Almeida et al.,2024]
Demo Paper Honourable Mention: Elias Bassani and Nicola Tonellotto, indxr: A Python
Library for Indexing File Lines [Bassani and Tonellotto, 2024]
IR4Good Paper Award: Amin Abolghasemi, Leif Azzopardi, Arian Askari, Maarten de Rijke
and Suzan Verberne, Measuring Bias in a Ranked List Using Term-Based Representations[Abolghasemi et al., 2024]
IR4Good Honourable Mention: Jinhao Pan, Ziwei Zhu, Jianling Wang, Allen Lin and James
Caverlee, Countering Mainstream Bias via End-to-End Adaptive Local Learning [Pan et al.,2024]
Industry Track Paper Award: Léa Briand, Théo Bontempelli, Walid Bendada, Mathieu Morlon, François Rigaud, Benjamin Chapus, Thomas Bouabça and Guillaume Salha-Galvan,
Let’s Get It Started: Fostering the Discoverability of New Releases on Deezer [Briand et al.,2024]
Industry Track Paper Honourable Mention: Xuanji Xiao, Jimmy Chen, Yuzhen Liu, Xing
Yao, Pei Liu and Chaosheng Fan, Lottery4CVR: Neuron-Connection Level Sharing for Multitask Learning in Video Conversion Rate Prediction [Xiao et al., 2024]

9

Workshops and Tutorials

ECIR 2024 received a very good range of workshop and tutorial proposals. The respective chairs
and their programme committees selected 10 workshops8 and 7 tutorials9 to be included in the
programme.
89

www.ecir2024.org/workshops
www.ecir2024.org/tutorials

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Workshops• Ricardo Campos, Alı́pio Jorge, Adam Jatowt, Sumit Bhatia and Marina Litvak organised the
7th International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story 2024) [Campos
et al., 2024].
• Zaiqiao Meng, Shangsong Liang, Xin Xin, Gianluca Moro, Evangelos Kanoulas and Emine
Yilmaz organised the 1st Workshop on Knowledge-Enhanced Information Retrieval (KEIR2024) [Meng et al., 2024].
• Marinella Petrocchi and Marco Viviani organised the 4th Workshop on Reducing Online
Misinformation Through Credible Information Retrieval (ROMCIR 2024) [Petrocchi andViviani, 2024].
• Maria Soledad Pera, Federica Cena, Theo Huibers, Monica Landoni, Noemi Mauro andEmiliana Murgia organised the 1st Workshop on Information Retrieval for Understudied
Users (IR4U2 2024) [Pera et al., 2024].
• Ludovico Boratto, Daniele Malitesta, Mirko Marras, Giacomo Medda, Cataldo Musto, Erasmo
Purificato organised the 1st International Workshop on Graph-Based Approaches in Information Retrieval (IRonGraphs 2024) [Boratto et al., 2024].
• Leif Azzopardi, Charles L. A. Clarke, Paul B. Kantor, Bhaskar Mitra, Johanne R. Trippas and Zhaochun Ren organised the The Search Futures Workshop (SearchFutures 2024)[Azzopardi et al., 2024].
• Sheikh Mastura Farzana, Maik Fröbe, Michael Granitzer, Gijs Hendriksen, Djoerd Hiemstra,
Martin Potthast and Saber Zerhoudi organised the 1st International Workshop on Open Web
Search (WOWS 2024) [Farzana et al., 2024].
• Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, Evangelos Kanoulas and Prasenjit Majumder organised the 3rdWorkshop on Augmented Intelligence in Technology-Assisted Review Systems (ALTARS)[Nunzio et al., 2024].
• Xuke Hu, Ross Purves, Ludovic Moncla, Jens Kersten and Kristin Stock organised the 2nd
International Workshop on Geographic Information Extraction from Texts (GeoExT 2024)[Hu et al., 2024].
• Ingo Frommholz, Philipp Mayr, Guillaume Cabanac and Suzan Verberne organised the14th International Workshop on Bibliometric-Enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2024)[Frommholz et al., 2024].

Tutorials• Johanne R. Trippas and David Maxwell on PhD Candidacy: A Tutorial on Overcoming
Challenges and Achieving Success [Trippas and Maxwell, 2024].
• Giacomo Balloccu, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Francesca Maridina Malloci and Mirko
Marras on Explainable Recommender Systems with Knowledge Graphs and Language Models [Balloccu et al., 2024].
• Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema, Andrea Pasin, Paolo Cremonesi and Nicola Ferro on Quantum
Computing for Information Retrieval and Recommender Systems [Dacrema et al., 2024].
• Yubao Tang, Ruqing Zhang, Zhaochun Ren, Jiafeng Guo and Maarten de Rijke on Recent
Advances in Generative Information Retrieval [Tang et al., 2024].
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• Aleksandr Petrov and Craig Macdonald on Transformers for Sequential Recommendation[Petrov and Macdonald, 2024].
• Priyanshu Priya, Mauajama Firdaus, Gopendra Vikram Singh and Asif Ekbal on Affective
Computing for Social Good Applications: Current Advances, Gaps and Opportunities inConversational Setting [Priya et al., 2024].
• Negar Arabzadeh, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi and Ebrahim Bagheri on Query
Performance Prediction: From Fundamentals to Advanced Techniques [Arabzadeh et al.,2024].

10

Doctoral Consortium

Finally, ECIR 2024 held a doctoral consortium where selected PhD students were invited topresent their work and interact with, and receive feedback from, allocated mentors. The doctoral
consortium was held on Sunday 24th March, and the students were also given space in the poster
sessions of the main conference to present their work to the conference delegates. The following
eight student were invited to present:• Nicolas Gutehrlé (Université de Franche-Comté), Semantic Search in Archive Collections
through Interpretable and Adaptable Relation Extraction About Person and Places• Luı́s Filipe Cunha (University of Porto), Document Level Event Extraction from Narratives• Aleksandr Vladimirovich Petrov (University of Glasgow), Effective and Efficient Transformer Models for Sequential Recommendation• Jana Isabelle Friese (University of Duisburg-Essen), Reproduction and Simulation of Interactive Retrieval Experiments• Jack McKechnie (University of Glasgow), Cascading Ranking Pipelines For Sensitivity-Aware
Search• Ankit Satpute (FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz-Institut für Informationsinfrastruktur), Analyzing
Mathematical Content for Plagiarism and Recommendations• Seán Healy (ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University), Shuffling a Few Stalls in a Crowded
Bazaar: Potential Impact of Document-side Fairness on Unprivileged Info-Seekers• Negin Ghasemi (Radboud University), Knowledge Transfer from Resource-Rich to ResourceScarce Environments

Acknowledgements
The success of ECIR 2024 would not have been possible without all of the help from the teamof volunteers and reviewers. We wish to thank all of the meta-reviewers and reviewers whohelped to ensure the high quality of the programme. We also wish to thank the organisationteam listed in Table 1 and the local organisation team led by Zaiqiao Meng. A huge thanks
to all of the local volunteers and Aileen Orr (University of Glasgow) who helped to ensure an
excellent conference experience for all of the attendees. We thank Richard McCreadie for his
immense efforts in compiling the proceedings of the conference, as well as Anna Kramer and Ronan
Nugent at Springer for their assistance. We acknowledge the generous support of our sponsors,
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who each provided valuable contributions to the conference. Specifically, we wish to thank ACM
SIGIR, Bloomberg, Google, Social AI CDT, The Scottish Informatics Computing Science Alliance(SICSA), Rora, Springer, Textkernal, Glasgow City Council, Glasgow Convention Bureau, theGlasgow Information Retrieval Group and the University of Glasgow. Lastly, we would like toacknowledge the ECIR 2023 General Chairs for their support, advice and recommendations that
helped us to better prepare for organising such an esteemed conference as ECIR.

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