SIGIR NEWSACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting 2023:
Secretary’s Notes
Laura Dietz
ACM SIGIR
USA
secretary_SIGIR@acm.org

1 Opening Matters
The 2023 ACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting took place as a hybrid event during the 46th
International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in
Taipei on July 26, 2023. The business meeting was led by the chair of the SIGIR Executive
Committee (EC), Vanessa Murdock.
The chair is thanking the conference organizers of SIGIR 2023 for planning this event. The
general chairs are Hsin-Hsi Chen (NTU), Wei-Jou (Edward) Duh (NTU), and Hen-Hsen Huang(Academia Sinica). The program chairs are Makoto Kato (University of Tsukuba), Josiane Mothe(Université de Toulouse), and Barbara Poblete (University of Chile and Amazon). A special thankyou is given to the student volunteers.

2 SIGIR Volunteers
Further appreciation is expressed towards the volunteers of the Special Interest Group in IR, whichare:
SIGIR Academy Chair: Alistair Moffat.
Awards Chairs: Hannah Bast, Gianluca DeMartini, and Mark Sanderson.
Early Career Researcher Awards Chair: Rob Capra.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Chairs: Hussein Suleman, and Suzan Verberne.
Women in IR Chair: Nazli Goharian.
SIGIR Historian: Donna Harman.
Information Directors: Nattiya Kanhabua and Guido Zuccon.
SIGIR Forum Editors: Josiane Mothe, Tirthankar Ghosal, and Julián Urbano.
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Student Affairs Chair: Jiaxin Mao, Maria Maistro, and Qingyao Ai.
Student Travel Grant Chair: Sole Pera.
Community Relations Coordinator: Bhaskar Mitra.
Sustainability Chairs: Tetsuya Sakai, Paul Thomas.
Several new members have been appointed (denoted in bold) and some new roles have beencreated to meet arising needs.

3 New Initiatives
Many community members have ideas for areas that could be improved or are suboptimal invarious ways. An even better way to engage is to not only identify those problems, but also to
propose a solution. The following two new initiatives are prime examples of community membersthat identified critical needs, proposed solutions, and volunteered to drive the implementation of
those initiatives.

3.1 Sustainability
Tetsuya Sakai and Paul Thomas are co-chairing this effort. They are looking for ways to run
SIGIR’s activities without exacerbating environmental problems. One of the main issues is conference travel, but it is important for the community to come together. Currently they offer achecklist for future conference general chairs and bidders. Current organizers of SIGIR 2023 took
several steps to follow the guidance of the sustainability chairs.1
The next steps include developing a set of review criteria to encourage green(er) researchmethods, as well as sustainable alternatives to be involved in the SIGIR community. Sustainability
chairs invite any feedback or suggestions, and are looking for volunteers to help with this effort.

3.2 SIGIR Virtual Forum
Suzan Verberne and Ebrahim Bagheri are leading this new initiative to hold a series of virtual
community events. Each event is designed to complement the current annual in-person activities with regularly recurring one-hour long meetings. These meetings are designed to maximize
interaction with other community members and stimulate research-oriented discussions. Thesemeetings can be about topical discussions, panels with well-known researchers, student sessions,
mentorship, conference tutorials, as well as multi-lingual exchanges.
Some populations may not be able to attend in-person conferences because of travel restrictions, financial limitations, family obligations, and others. The goal is to extend the reach andengagement of the SIGIR community in a sustainable and accessible way. This includes researchers, students, and practitioners who may or may not be able to physically attend the SIGIR
events otherwise.
1

Sustainability Guidance: https://sigir.org/sigir2023/attend/sustainability/

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The Virtual Forum is preparing a first series of virtual events. Each event will have a dedicated organization committee. The steering committee is comprised of Michael Bendersky, Tamer
Elsayed, Yanyan Lan, Sean MacAvaney, Ayah Soufan, Ebrahim Bagheri, and Suzan Verberne.

3.3 New SIGIR Website
The Executive Committee is working on a redesign of the Web presence for SIGIR. The goals are toprovide links to relevant resources (e.g., SIGIR Forum), provide up-to-date information on various
established initiatives (e.g., Awards), highlight our efforts in other areas (e.g., Sustainability, DEI,
and the Virtual Forum), and provide contact information for SIG volunteers. Also, since thememberships in SIGIR are declining over time, an additional goal of this Website is to explain theadvantages of joining the SIG.

3.4 Upcoming Topics in 2024
The SIGIR executive committee will re-consider the following areas in the coming months.
3.4.1 Reviewing
Given ongoing issues with review quality, we will try to learn from successful processes at otherconferences. This may include dedicated training phases for reviewers and meta-reviewers andestablishing quality control mechanisms along with better guidelines. We will propose a small experiment at the coming review cycles. The committee is welcoming proposals on how to implement
better processes from the community.
3.4.2 Conference cost
Due to an overall rise in costs, currently the price of conferences is exceeding the revenue. One
issue is that for most conference organizers it is the first time running an event of this scale. It
is not necessarily clear how the proposed budget during bidding and revised budgets on during
post-bid contract formation (TRMF) will affect the conference costs and registration rates. The
Executive Committee is planning to provide more guidance for bidders and general chairs via an“organizer’s cheat sheet”.
3.4.3 Virtual conference experiences
Beyond the Virtual Forum initiative, a focus is to improve the virtual side of our conferences,which are important for diversity and inclusion, but currently suboptimal and expensive. We
will need to think more strategically how to make online experiences more satisfying and lessexpensive.
3.4.4 New co-sponsors
The Executive Committee is considering a proposal from CHI to co-sponsor the CHIIR conference.

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Figure 1. SIGIR’s finances over recent years. Expenses indicates current expenses such as travel grants
and conference underwriting. Revenue indicates the available funds reflecting income growth.

4 Treasurer’s Report
SIGIR treasurer Carsten Eickhoff presents SIGIR’s finances. The 23 fiscal year ended on June
30th. Not all conferences have closed yet, so some numbers are projections. Revenue and Expenses
are roughly in balance (red and green line in Figure ??). Since 2018, conference costs have rapidly
increased, our budget is dominated by SIGIR and CIKM conferences. Our overall account balance,
has been used to cushion years with high costs, but is now starting to decline.
Similar to years before the pandemic, the yearly expenses are dominated by grants (of about
USD 100,000). Additional items are publication costs, awards prizes, and professional services(such as designing the website). Grants cover student travel grants, reduced conference registration
rates, as well as the “SIGIR & Friends” program which supports regional and international eventsin the IR community such as FIRE, ADCS, ESSIR, IIR, CLEF, CORIA, ASIRF, SPIRE, andsimilar. We are supporting two SIGIR chapters, Beijing and Tokyo. Additionally conferencecollocated SIG events are supported via this means, such as Women in IR.
With respect to income, we currently have a projected loss from SIGIR 2022—however thisconference has not yet fully closed and the result may change. The income from the ACM Digital
Library, membership dues, and interest is similar to earlier years. This amounts to a total balanceof USD 160.000.

4.1 Conferences Co-funded by SIGIR
The ACM SIG IR special interest group has a stake in several related conferences. This includes
SIGIR (the conference), CIIR, ICTIR, CIKM (50%, co-funded by SIG WEB), AFIRM (50%, cofunded with SIG KDD), JCDL (34%), and WSDM (25%, co-funded by SIG KDD, SIG WEB, and
SIG MOD).
Having a stake in a conference means to both financially support/underwrite it, but also toobtain a share of the profits. Usually the SIGIR conference obtains the highest profits/losses, with
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CIKM being second. In the past fiscal cycle, the SIGIR conference resulted in significant losses
that could not be counter-balanced with the profits of other conferences. Because we have solid
savings, this is not yet a problem.
Overall there is a slight decline in SIGIR memberships, and conference costs have increased
significantly. Especially A/V costs and hybrid costs are increasing in unexpected ways. After lows
during the pandemic, we are returning to pre-pandemic budgets.

5 Conference Costs
As a community we would like to keep the conference costs affordable and accessible. Making
conferences more affordable will also make them more accessible to researchers from less wellfunded research groups.
There are three major contributors to the cost of a conference arise: The location itself in theform of hotel cost, restaurants, and flights. The costs of the conference venue, especially the foodand beverage costs can be high, and conference hotel room blocks that are not filled. The costs ofhybrid conferences can be very high, especially when every session is streamed as needed for rich
online experiences.
One main lever to reduce costs are to choose a less expensive location and reduce the food &beverage budget, as seen at RecSys 2022. Another lever is the hybrid conference experience. We
want to be careful to make it possible for people to participate, even when they cannot attend
in person. However, streaming every session online is expensive due to additional staff in every
conference room and the setup for providing a rich interaction experience. In addition, online
platforms for poster meetings and breakout rooms are often not used. If these are not driving
engagement, we need to think about how to redesign the online experiences, so we can still be
inclusive, participatory, and interactive but maybe not with many features that people are notusing. We want to offer an online experience that is engaging at necessary costs.
As a community we should consider to hold smaller local events, that are simpler and lesslavish but may happen more frequently. We should focus on less expensive locations and consider
meetings with lower food-and-beverage (F&B) rates.
We want to make sure that we charge people for attendance, and not the publication. Students
should pay the student rate, ACM members should pay the member rate, same for virtual andin-person rates. Someone attending to present five papers, you should pay one registration fee.

6 The SIGIR DEI Initiative
DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity and refers to a joint effort of the Special Interest
Group in IR (not just the conference) to ensure that everyone who would like to participate in
the SIGIR community can do so effectively. This initiative is co-chaired by Hussein Suleman andSuzan Verberne. So far the initiative has led to a DEI checklist for conferences/events2 (from2020) and recommendations for more inclusive conference presentations3 (from 2021).
2
3

DEI conference checklist: http://sigir.org/conferences/diversity-and-inclusion/
Presentation checklist: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14TCY2F-C60CXMfTrXo7ldDx2NqLw476b

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Some SIGIR grant money has been set aside for DEI grants to enable people from underrepresented countries or people with family care responsibilities to attend. However it is challenging to reach the people for whom this grant is intended. Hardly any eligible applications for thisgrant were received. The remainder of the allotted money was transferred to the student travel
funds.
At the day before the business meeting, a DEI session was held, both in-person during lunch
and online hosted by Avijit Ghosh and Luca Soldaini. The purpose of these meetings are tobrainstorm how IR conferences can be made more inclusive. The suggestions are still being
collected, and will be published as a SIGIR Forum report.

7 SIGIR Conferences
Reports from past, future, and potential future conferences are presented.

7.1 SIGIR 2024: Washington D.C.
The next SIGIR conference will be held in Washington D.C. on July 14-18, 2024. General chairs
are Grace Hui Yang, Hongning Wang, Sam Han. Program chairs will be Claudia Hauff, Guido
Zuccon, and Yi Zhang. The conference will be held at Georgetown University Conference Center.
There are a few options within walking distance from the University, but a larger number ofaffordable options are located in Arlington. The conference team is nearly formed.

7.2 SIGIR 2025: Padova
The conference location for 2025 was revealed to be in Padova, Italy with General Chairs Nicola
Ferro, Maria Maistro, and Gabriella Pasi.

7.3 Bids for SIGIR 2026
Bids were encouraged from Asia and Oceania. The following bids were presented:• Christchurch, New Zealand by Andrew Trotman.
• Melbourne, Australia by Alistair Moffat.

7.4 Sponsored Events
A brief announcement of upcoming sponsored conferences was made.
SIGIR-AP 2023: November 26–29 Beijing, China.
ICTIR 2024: Co-located with SIGIR 2024.
CIKM 2023: October 21–25 Birmingham, UK.4
4

CIKM’23 :https://uobevents.eventsair.com/cikm2023/

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CHIIR 2024: March 10–14 Sheﬀield, UK.5
WSDM 2024: March 4–8, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.6
JCDL 2024: TBD.7
CIKM 2024: Boise, Idaho.
CIKM 2025: Seoul, South Korea.

8 Awards
8.1 SIGIR Academy
The ACM SIGIR Academy honors and recognizes individuals who have made significant, cumulative contributions to the development of the field of IR in research innovation and/or service. The
2023 inductees are: Nick Craswell (Microsoft, USA), Nicola Ferro (University of Padua, Italy),
Jimmy Lin (University of Waterloo, Canada), Tetsuya Sakai (Waseda University, Japan), Ryen
White (Microsoft, USA), and Yiming Yang (Carnegie Mellon University, USA).
For the Class of 2024, nominations are accepted until December 31, 2023.8 Nominations andQuestions can be sent to sigir-academy-award@acm.org.

8.2 ACM SIGIR Early Career Researcher Awards
This new set of awards are to appreciate early career researchers in the IR community. Awards
are offered in three categories.
Research: For single or cumulative research contributions to IR.
Community Engagement: For contributions to professional service in the IR community (e.g.,
SIGIR leadership, conference volunteering).
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: For contributions around initiating, driving, and supporting
diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the community.
Eligible candidates are within seven years from the conferral of their PhD degrees (career
disruptions excluded). Candidates can be nominated by any current SIGIR member or active
community participant. Self-nominations are permitted.
The 2023 SIGIR ECR Awards selection committee is comprised of• Nazli Goharian, Georgetown.
• Cluadia Hauff, Delft/Spotify.
• Makoto Kato, University of Tsukuba.
5

CHIIR’24: https://chiir2024.github.io/
WSDM’24: https://www.wsdm-conference.org/2024/
7
JCDL: https://www.jcdl.org/
8
SIGIR Academy: https://sigir.org/awards/sigir-academy/6

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• Josiane Mothe, University of Toulouse.
• Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal.
• Yiming Yang, CMU.
• ChengXiang Zhai, Univ. Illinois UC.
• Rob Capra (chair), University of North Carolina.
In the inaugural year, the committee decided to hand out two awards per category whenever
there were two extremely well-qualified candidates. The following candidates were selected in thethree categories for 2023:
Research: Hamed Zamani and Chenyan Xiong.
Community Engagement: Hamed Zamani and Chung-Chi Chen.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Maria Maistro.
The deadline for 2024 award nominations is December 31st, 2023.
More information about this award is available online.9

8.3 SIGIR 2023 Best Paper Awards
The best papers at SIGIR 2023 were announced at the SIGIR 2023 banquet.
Best Paper Award• The Information Retrieval Experiment Platform10
Maik Fröbe, Jan Heinrich Reimer, Sean MacAvaney, Niklas Deckers, Simon Reich, Janek
Bevendorff, Benno Stein, Matthias Hagen, Martin Potthast
Best Student Paper Award• A Symmetric Dual Encoding Dense Retrieval Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Visual
Question Answering11
Alireza Salemi, Juan Altmayer Pizzorno, Hamed Zamani
Best Paper Honorable Mention• Aligning Distillation For Cold-start Item Recommendation
Feiran Huang, Zefan Wang, Xiao Huang, Yufeng Qian, Zhetao Li, Hao Chen
• End-to-End Multimodal Fact-Checking and Explanation Generation: A Challenging Dataset
and Models
Barry Menglong Yao, Aditya Shah, Lichao Sun, Jin-Hee Cho, Lifu Huang
92023 SIGIR ECR Awards: https://sigir.org/awards/sigir-ecr-awards/
2023 SIGIR Best Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3539618.3591888
112023 SIGIR Best Student paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3539618.3591629
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• Alleviating Matthew Effect of Offline Reinforcement Learning in Interactive Recommendation
Chongming Gao, Kexin Huang, Jiawei Chen, Yuan Zhang, Biao Li, Peng Jiang, Shiqi Wang,
Zhong Zhang, Xiangnan He• A Geometric Framework for Query Performance Prediction in Conversational Search
Guglielmo Faggioli, Nicola Ferro, Cristina Ioana Muntean, Raffaele Perego, Nicola Tonellotto

Best Short Paper Award
SparseEmbed: Learning Sparse Lexical Representations with Contextual Embeddings for
Retrieval12
Weize Kong, Jeffrey M. Dudek, Cheng Li, Mingyang Zhang, Michael Bendersky
Best Short Paper Honorable Mention• Graph Collaborative Signals Denoising and Augmentation for Recommendation
Ziwei Fan, Ke Xu, Zhang Dong, Hao Peng, Jiawei Zhang, Philip S. Yu• Text-to-Motion Retrieval: Towards Joint Understanding of Human Motion Data and Natural Language
Nicola Messina, Jan Sedmidubsky, Fabrizio Falchi, Tomás Rebok

8.4 ICTIR 2023 Best Paper Awards
The best papers at the ICTIR 2023 conference were announced at the ICTIR closing session.
Best Paper Award• Perspectives on Large Language Models for Relevance Judgment13
Guglielmo Faggioli, Laura Dietz, Charles Clarke, Gianluca Demartini, Matthias Hagen,
Claudia Hauff, Noriko Kando, Evangelos Kanoulas, Martin Potthast, Benno Stein and Henning Wachsmuth
Honorable Mention• Hierarchical Transformer-based Query by Multiple Documents
Zhiqi Huang, Shahrzad Naseri, Hamed Bonab, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar and James Allan

8.5 SIGIR 2023 Test of Time Awards
The Test of Time Award recognizes research that has had long-lasting influence, including impact
on a subarea of information retrieval research, across subareas of information retrieval research,
12132023 SIGIR Best Short Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3539618.3592065
2023 ICTIR Best Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3578337.3605136

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and outside of the information retrieval research community. The winning paper is selected fromthe set of full papers presented at the main SIGIR conference 10–12 years before.
The test-of-time awards were announced at the SIGIR 2023 banquet.
Test of Time Award• Beliefs and Biases in Web Search14
Ryen W. WhiteSIGIR 2013
Honorable Mentions• A Cascade Ranking Model for Eﬀicient Ranked Retrieval
Lidan Wang, Jimmy Lin, Donald Metzler
SIGIR 2011
• Faster Top-k Document Retrieval Using Block-Max Indexes
Shuai Ding, Torsten Suel
SIGIR 2011
The members of the selection committee were, in alphabetical order: Hannah Bast (chair),
Ben Carterette, Shane Culpepper, Gabriella Kazai, Yoelle Maarek, Jian-Yun Nie, Javed Aslam,
Ian Ruthven, and Justin Zobel.

9 Audience Comments and Questions
During the last part of the business meeting the floor was opened to the audience. The following
topics were brought up:
Visa issues: Suggestion to select conference locations that minimize visa issues, especially for
Chinese and Iranian passport holders (many researchers could not attend SIGIR ’23 inperson). Local satellite events could be options, but would not be a substitute for attendinglarge conferences like SIGIR.
Virtual conference experiences: A question was raised when we will stop having hybrid conferences. The SIGIR chair responds that since virtual offering are important for inclusivity,
we will need to continue it. It was noted that people who present online get less attention.
The virtual format should be improved to be more engaging. A suggestion was made toappoint a dedicated Online/Hybrid Chair to explore creative solutions.
Improving the in-person experience too: It was brought up that the in-person experience
could also be made more engaging. For example other conferences present all papers as
posters. Potentially virtual posters could link to the online experience.
142023 Test Of Time Award paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2484028.2484053

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Conference deadlines and dates: Suggestions were raised to move the conference to a less hottime of the year, however, this would lead to timing conflicts with other events. A suggestion
is to increase the time between paper notification and conference, to allow more time forvisa application and processing. This could also avoid conflicts with end-of-year holidays
and Chinese New Years festivities.
Travel grants and library incomes: A suggestion was made to use income from subscriptions
and digital library to provide more student travel support. Concerns are raised about how
this is affected by ACM’s “open access” policies, where authors need to pay significant
publication processing fees.
AFIRM: Husein Suleman and Douglas Oard are considering options for holding another installment of the ACM SIGIR/SIGKDD Africa Summer School on Machine Learning for Data
Mining and Search. Potentially such an event would be virtual, due to diﬀiculties of travelling within the African continent. Hamed Zamani is interested in co-organizing.
ICTIR: Hamed Zamani is soliciting ideas for improving and reframing the International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval.
Avoiding political issues: It was mentioned that the time at scientific conferences should befocused on technical discussions, and that political issues should be avoided to the extent
possible.
Additional points can be raised via the SIGIR slack instance.15 For access contact slack admin
Laura Dietz (dietz@cs.unh.edu). The community is also welcome to reach out to the Executive
Committee by email: chair_SIGIR@acm.org; vc_SIGIR@acm.org, treasurer_SIGIR@acm.org,
secretary_SIGIR@acm.org.

15

ACM SIGIR Slack: https://acmsigir.slack.com

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