CONFERENCE REPORTREPORT ON THE FIRST 5 YEARS OF THE TRACK ON
INFORMATION ACCESS AND RETRIEVAL OF THE ACM
SYMPOSIUM ON APPLIED COMPUTINGFabio Crestani° and Gabriella Pasi*°Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
f.crestani@cis.strath.ac.uk* DISCO, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca
Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 8, Milano, Italy
pasi@disco.unimib.itAbstract
We briefly report on 5 years of successfully running the ACM
Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) track on Information
Access and Retrieval (IAR). We believe the track plays avaluable role as a forum for the presentation of research anddevelopment work in Information Retrieval. The growing
number of submissions indicates that there is a need for suchforum.

1A Brief History of the SAC-IAR Track

Readers of SIGIR FORUM know very well that Information Retrieval (IR) is a very hard andcomplex task and that a large volume of research has attempted to explain and tackle. Nowadays,
research in IR is central to the design and development of advanced information access technologies andspans a number of research topics including document modelling, document classification andcategorization, system architecture, user interfaces, data visualisation, languages, topic detection,evaluation, etc.
In the past 30 years, IR has grown well beyond its primary goals of indexing and searching textual
documents in static bibliographic collections, and has moved away from the perception of being thenarrow area of interest of librarians and information experts. Information access technologies, and inparticular IR, are currently being used in many different application contexts that go far beyond theinitial scope of their design. Moreover, the development of the Internet has made urgent the problem ofdesigning systems that effectively retrieve from the WWW information that is relevant to users’ needs.
The application of models and techniques proposed and tested in standard experimental contexts to new
application areas is a very challenging task that we believe is worth of great attention by the researchers.
Currently there are two main venues where the research and development in IR is presented: theACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (also known as SIGIR) andACM SIGIR ForumPage n0Vol. 40 No. 2 December 2006

the annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC for short) organised by the National Institute of Standardsand Technology. These two conferences stand at the opposite ends of the spectrum of research anddevelopment in IR, dealing with mainly theoretical (SIGIR) or mainly evaluation related (TREC)
aspects. The special track on Information Access and Retrieval (IAR) of the ACM Symposium on
Applied Computing (SAC) lies, instead, in the middle of this spectrum, where we believe very valuable
and successful applications of IR research lie. These applications might sometime not be theoreticallyvery advanced and their effectiveness and/or efficiency might be sometime relatively unremarkable
when measured by TREC standards, but their contributions to research and development in IR is still
very valuable and useful. In fact, lessons learned from these applications can be very useful not only topractitioners, but also to researchers, as a testing ground for new models and methods that are still too
weak to be presented at SIGIR or experimented with at TREC.
The IAR Track was firstly organized at the ACM SAC 2002, and since then it has been running atSAC every year. While papers in all aspects of research and development of IR are considered, it isconcerned mainly with the theory, implementation and evaluation of IR to novel application areas andnovel contexts of information access. Its main aim is to provide a forum for allowing researchers andpractitioners in the IR field to present their experiences in the middle of the theory-practice spectrum ofIR research and development. Since 2002 papers accepted for presentation and publication in theproceedings published by ACM and included in the ACM Digital Libraries have concerned several
important and hot areas of research and development in IR and closely related areas, including
multimedia, information filtering, document summarisation, information extraction, effectivenessevaluation, classification, web searching, and cross language IR. Since 2002, the track has always been
co-chaired by the two original proposers of the track: Fabio Crestani and Gabriella Pasi.
Submitted/Accepted Papers to SAC-IAR
6054

Papers5044403433

Accepted

273020Submitted

1815
1216

1210
2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Years

Figure 1

The graph in Figure 1 shows the number of papers submitted to the IAR track since 2002. As it canbe seen, the number of submission has been steadily increasing (with the exception of 2003, when ashort decline in submission could be explained by many factors external to the track, such as SARS, forexample). The high and increasing number of submissions over the last 5 years is also proof of theimportance of the IR research field and in particular of its applications. Conversely, the number ofACM SIGIR Forum

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papers accepted and the consequent acceptance rate has been almost constant, thus enabling us toconcentrate more and more on accepting papers of very high quality. For this, our gratitude goes to theover 50 member of the track Program Committee whose help was invaluable for the selection process.
In fact, every paper was reviewed by at least 3 members of the Program Committee and only papers
with at least two positive reviews were considered of acceptable quality to be considered for acceptance.
Finally, within the context of SAC the IAR track has been growing in prestige and importance,accounting for a sizeable portion of all papers submitted and accepted, also in relation to other longestablished and running track.

2SAC-IAR 2006

The 2006 edition of the Symposium on Applied Computing track on Information Access andRetrieval (SAC-IAR 2006) was held in Dijon, France, on 23-27 April. So far, it has been the mostsuccessful edition of the track, attracting 54 paper submissions and confirming the trend of increasing
number of submissions since the start of this initiative. Only 16 papers were accepted, thus giving thetrack an acceptance rate of less than 30%, the lowest we ever had in previous tracks. Given the highquality of the submission and the recent introduction of posters at SAC, we also accepted 5 posters. As
in many other ACM conferences, including SIGIR, each poster is allowed two pages in the proceedings.
The 16 papers were presented in 4 sessions of 4 papers each. Each paper had 20 minutes forpresentation and 5 minutes for questions and discussion. The questions and discussion often went wellbeyond the 5 minutes allocated, showing how interested the audience was in the work presented. We do
not attempt to describe the content of these papers in this report. We simply outline the topics dealt ineach session.
The first session comprised papers that attempt to use the document or the query structure in a
number of tasks, ranging from document summarisation, discovery of unexpected information, querytransformation and retrieval effectiveness. The second session presented papers tackling information
classification, categorisation and filtering for email, novelty detection and P2P file sharing. While these
two sessions were rather homogenous in topics, the remaining sessions were more heterogeneous.
Session 3 presented three papers dealing with web searching, addressing topics like web search ranking,
web pages template detection, and clustering of web snippets. This section also presented a paper
dealing with light stemming of a number of different languages for cross-language IR. Session 4
presented three papers on multimedia IR, dealing with retrieval and filtering of music, logo andtrademark images, and images of illuminated manuscripts. This session also included a paper on atranslation technique for out-of-vocabulary words.

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QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Figure 2

Figure 2 depicts graphically how important the IAR track has grown in relation to the other 40 tracks
held at SAC 2006 accounting for a good percentage of the accepted papers.

3Conclusions

The story of the ACM SAC-IAR track has been a success story, so far. It started almost as a joke,from our coincidental desire to go and visit some friends in a nice city (how many other workshops or
tracks have started in that same way?), but it has grown to become a recognised name. In particular, it
has become what we had hoped, that is an alternative forum to more traditional ones where IR
researchers can present the results of their latest work, even if it is still in progress or it is nottheoretically very strong or it has not been evaluated using TREC collections and methodology.
We plan to run the IAR track at SAC for only a few more years and then pass its organisation toother capable hands. We hope we will be able to find some very dedicated souls to take our job andcontinue this success story.

4

Acknowledgments

We thank all PC members who in these five years have allowed the ACM SAC IAR Special Trackto be so successful. They provided a great support in reviewing the papers and their comments havecertainly been of great help for authors in improving their works.

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