EVENT REPORTCIRCLE 2020 - The First Joint Conference ofthe Information Retrieval Communities inEurope
Iván Cantador
Depart. of CS and Engineering
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
28049 Madrid, Spain
Ivan.Cantador@uam.es

Max Chevalier
IRIT UMR5505, CNRS
Univ. Toulouse III - P. Sabatier
F-31062 Toulouse, France
Max.Chevalier@irit.fr

Massimo Melucci
Depart. of Information Engineering
Università degli Studi di Padova
35131 Padua, Italy
Massimo.Melucci@unipd.it

Josiane Mothe
IRIT UMR5505, CNRS, INSPEUniversité de Toulouse
F-31062 Toulouse, France
Josiane.Mothe@irit.fr

AbstractThe Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE 2020) is
the first joint conference of the French, Italian, Spanish,and Swiss information retrieval communities. Although these communities had conceived the CIRCLE conference as a meetingand networking venue, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they had to make the conference
as fully virtual event. Nonetheless, the three days of conference gathered interesting studies
and research work on a wide range of topics on information retrieval, such as topic and document modelling, query and ranking refinement, information retrieval in e-government, socialmedia, recommender systems, information retrieval evaluation, indexing and annotation, user
profiling and interaction, frameworks and systems, and semantic extraction.

1Introduction

The Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE 20201 ) is thefirst joint conference of the French, Italian, Spanish and Swiss information retrieval communities.
CIRCLE 2020 arose from a twofold wish to gather three national Information Retrieval (IR)conferences and to offer young researchers the opportunity to meet and discuss with seniorresearchers. CIRCLE is supported by the ARIA French conference (CORIA, COnférence enRecherche d’Information et Applications), the Spanish Conference on Information Retrieval (CERI,1

https://www.irit.fr/CIRCLE

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Congreso Español de Recuperación de Información), the Italian Information Retrieval Workshop,
and the Swiss IR community.
The main objective of CIRCLE 2020 is to propose a unique place for stimulating and disseminating research in IR, where senior/industrial and early stage researchers (including MSc andPhD students) can network and discuss their research results in a friendly environment.
The presentations and discussions of the conference were done virtually. If the COVID-19
emergency had not happened, CIRCLE 2020 would have taken place on July 6-9, 2020 at Samatan,Gers, in the South of France (50 minutes from Toulouse).

2Conference topics

CIRCLE 2020 offered an opportunity to present and discuss both theoretical and empirical research. Relevant topics included, but were not restricted to:• Search and ranking. Research on core IR algorithmic topics, including IR at scale, covering topics such as:– Queries and query analysis;– Web search, including link analysis, sponsored search, search advertising, adversarial
search and spam, and vertical search;– Retrieval models and ranking, including diversity and aggregated search;– Efficiency and scalability;– Theoretical models and foundations of information retrieval and access.
• Content analysis, recommendation and classification. Research focusing on recommender systems, rich content representations and content analysis, covering topics such as:– Filtering and recommender systems;– Document representation;– Content analysis and information extraction, including summarisation, text representation, readability, sentiment analysis, and opinion mining;– Cross- and multilingual search;– Clustering, classification, and topic models;– IR and natural language processing.
• Domain-specific applications. Research focusing on domain-specific IR challenges, covering topics such as:– Social search;– Search in structured data including email search and entity search;– Multimedia search;– IR for Education;
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– Legal document search;– Health, including genomics and bioinformatics;– IR and digital libraries;– IR and databases;– Other domains such as enterprise, news search, app search, archival search.
• Artificial intelligence, semantics and dialog. Research bridging AI and IR, especiallytoward deep semantics and dialog with intelligent agents, covering topics such as:– Question answering;– Conversational systems and retrieval, including spoken language interfaces, dialog management systems, and intelligent chat systems;– Semantics and knowledge graphs;– Deep learning for IR, embeddings, and agents.
• Human factors and interfaces. Research into user-centered aspects of IR, including userinterfaces, behaviour modelling, privacy, and interactive systems, covering topics such as:– Mining and modelling search activity, including user and task models, click models, log
analysis, behavioural analysis, and attention modelling;– Interactive and personalised search;– Collaborative search, social tagging and crowdsourcing;– Information privacy and security.
• Evaluation. Research that focuses on the measurement and evaluation of IR systems,
covering topics such as:– User-centred evaluation methods, including measures of user experience and performance, user engagement and search task design;– Test collections and evaluation metrics, including the development of new test collections;– Eye-tracking and physiological approaches, such as fMRI
– Evaluation of novel information access tasks and systems such as multi-turn information
access;– Statistical methods and reproducibility issues in information retrieval evaluation.
• Future directions. Research with theoretical or empirical contributions on new technicalor social aspects of IR, especially in more speculative directions or with emerging technologies, covering topics such as:– Novel approaches to IR;– Ethics, economics, and politics;
ACM SIGIR Forum3Vol. 54 No. 2 December 2020– Applications of search to social good;– IR with new devices, including wearable computing, neuroinformatics, sensors,– Internet-of-Things, vehicles.

3Submissions

For the CIRCLE common track, submissions were requested to be in English, the official languageof the conference. Submission were peer reviewed by at least three members of conference programcommittee in a double blind process.
Authors were invited to submit one of the following types of contributions:
While long papers were supposed to describe mature and original research results, short papers
were conceived as exciting new work that is not yet mature enough for a long paper, such as forexample “doctoral papers”. Extended abstracts could include a system demonstration, a project
presentation, or an already published piece of work (e.g. in a top level IR journal or conference).
Applications of information retrieval to novel areas were especially welcome.
The Easychair system was used for the paper submission and review processes.
• Long original papers (from 6 to 8 pages + 1 page for references)• Short original papers (from 3 to 4 pages + 1 page for references)• Extended abstracts containing descriptions of ongoing projects or presenting already published results (up to 2 pages)

Figure 1: From submissions, authors’ keyphrases
Figure 1 shows the main words from the keyphrases the authors associated to their submissions.
The accepted papers ranged from theoretical work and experimental research to system andproject descriptions. Each accepted paper was included in the conference proceedings and wereACM SIGIR Forum

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orally presented. The proceedings are online published by CEUR Workshop Proceedings at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2621/).
There were also some CERI submissions with oral presentations of papers written in either
Spanish or English. Special interest was devoted to papers on applications with municipal, regionalor national impact in Spain, collaborations from Spanish institutions and companies, or using
corpora in Spanish. Short original papers or extended abstracts were allowed. As in previous
editions of CERI, defended thesis from June 2018 to May 2020 could qualify for the SERI Awardto the best Spanish PhD dissertation in IR. Details are given by the Spanish IR association2 .

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Scientific committee

Iván Cantador, Max Chevalier and Massimo Melucci are very grateful to the program committee
members who evaluated the submissions. The PC chairs could not have prepared such a interestingscientific programme without the thoughtful and careful comments from all the 68 PC members
and 6 additional reviewers.
− Aris Anagnostopoulos, Sapienza University of Roma, Italy− Juan Antonio Martı́nez Comeche, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain− Ismail Badache, Laboratoire d’Informatique et Systèmes, INSPE Aix-Marseille University,France− Álvaro Barreiro, University of A Coruña, Spain− Roberto Basili, University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy− Luca Becchetti, Sapienza University of Roma, Italy− Alejandro Bellogı́n, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain− Patrice Bellot, Aix-Marseille Université – CNRS (LSIS), France− Rafael Berlanga, Universitat Jaume I, Spain− Catherine Berrut, LIG, Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble I, France− Paolo Boldi, University of Milano, Italy− Fidel Cacheda, Universidade da Coruña, Spain− Sylvie Calabretto, LIRIS, France− Claudio Carpineto, Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Italy− Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain2

http://seri.org.es

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− Jean-Pierre Chevallet, Grenoble Alpes University, France− Adrian-Gabriel Chifu, Aix Marseille Univ, Université de Toulon, CNRS, LIS, France− Vincent Claveau, IRISA – CNRS, France− Fabio Crestani, University of Lugano (USI), Switzerland− Luis M. de Campos, University of Granada, Spain− Emanuele Di Buccio, University of Padua, Italy− Tommaso Di Noia, Politecnico di Bari, Italy− Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, University of Padua, Italy− Antoine Doucet, University of La Rochelle, France− Elı́as Fernández-Combarro, University of Oviedo, Spain− Juan M. Fernández-Luna, University of Granada, Spain− Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy− Sebastien Fournier, Aix-Marseille Université, France− Mathias Géry, Jean Monnet University, France− Lorraine Goeuriot, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, France− Julio Gonzalo, National University of Distance Education, Spain− Gilles Hubert, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, France− Juan F. Huete, University of Granada, Spain− Sylvain Lamprier, LIP6 – UPMC, France− David Losada, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain− Miguel A. Martinez-Prieto, University of Valladolid, Spain− Stefano Mizzaro, University of Udine, Italy− Boughanem Mohand, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, France− Josiane Mothe, INSPE, Université de Toulouse, IRIT, URM 5505 CNRS, France− Philippe Mulhem, Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory, France− Franco Maria Nardini, ISTI-CNR, Italy− Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal, Canada
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− Javier Nogueras Iso, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain− Salvatore Orlando, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy− Javier Parapar, University of A Coruña, Spain− Gabriella Pasi, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy− Raffaele Perego, ISTI-CNR, Italy− Karen Pinel-Sauvagnat, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, France− Benjamin Piwowarski, CNRS / University Pierre et Marie Curie, France− Georges Quénot, Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble, CNRS, France− Lara Quijano-Sánchez, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain− Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain− Catherine Roussey, Irstea Clermont-Ferrand Center, France− Eric Sanjuan, Laboratoire Informatique d’Avignon- Université d’Avignon, France− Jacques Savoy, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland− Giovanni Semeraro, University of Bari, Italy− Christophe Servan, QWANT, France− Chantal Soulé-Dupuy, IRIT, Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, France− Laure Soulier, Sorbonne Universités UPMC-LIP6, France− Lynda Tamine, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, France− Marko Tkalcic, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy− Nicola Tonellotto, Information Science and Technologies Institute, Italy− Jesús Tramullas, University of Zaragoza, Spain− Raquel Trillo-Lado, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain− Julien Velcin, University of Lyon 2, France− Jesús Vilares, Universidade da Coruña, Centro de Investigación CITIC, Spain− Manuel Vilares, University of Vigo, Spain− Haifa Zargayouna, University Paris 13, France
Additional reviewers were Jibril Frej, Andrea Iovine, Kevin Roitero, Marco Polignano,
Lucia Siciliani, and Sebastiano Vigna.
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5Mentoring

Students co-authoring accepted papers were offered the possibility to meet face-to-face with senior researchers in specific mentoring parallel sessions. Seven students took benefit from thatopportunity. The PC chairs and organisers would like to thank Alejandro Bellogı́n, Catherine
Berrut, Fidel Cacheda, Fabio Crestani, Georges Quénot, and Julien Velcin for voluntarily
mentoring those students.

6Publications

In total, 8 long papers (78% acceptance rate), 18 short papers (83% acceptance rate), and 12
extended abstracts (79% acceptance rate) were accepted for publication and presentation, leading
to 38 oral communications. These papers were grouped into thematic sessions3 as follows (see ):• Frameworks and systems• Indexing and annotation• Information Retrieval evaluation• Information Retrieval in e-government• Query and ranking refinement• Recommender systems• Semantic extraction• Social media• Topic and document modelling• User profiling and interaction
Proceedings have been published under CEUR (Cantador et al. [2020]) and are freely available
at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2621/. The associated bibtex entry is:@inproceedings{cantador2020circle,title={CIRCLE 2020-The First Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities inEurope},
author={Cantador, Iván and Melucci, Massimo and Chevalier, Max and Mothe, Josiane},booktitle={CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
volume={2621},
year={2020}}
3

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7Local organisation

Unfortunately, the conference could not be hosted in the planned holiday resort, but has to bevirtual. The IR communities had conceived the CIRCLE conference as a meeting and networking
venue. The COVID-19 pandemic at the time of the conference did not make it possible.
Presentations were 15 minutes long, plus 5 minutes for questions, whatever the type of paper.
Prerecorded presentations were not used, but rather live presentations and discussions using theCisco Webex system. Each half day, a slot was devoted for trying connections. A virtual connection
the day before the conference (on the 6th of July) was also organised for those who wanted to test
the above system. Each paper needed to go with a registration with a 50 fee to be included in theproceedings. In case of papers with several authors, just a single fee for the paper was required.
Other authors and non-authors participants had to freely register.
During the conference, specific rooms were open for coffee break or discussions.

8Sponsors and student grants

CIRCLE 2020 received the support of ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval(SIGIR). It also received the local support of the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouseand Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. Some grants for students where managed thank to thesesponsors. Students authoring papers were offered the possibility to have a discussion in a virtualface-to-face meeting of about 30 minutes. These meetings were scheduled on the last day of theconference.
Last words from the conference PC Chairs. CIRCLE 2020 could not have been organisedin the turbulent context that we have experienced without a reactive and efficient organisationcommittee. We give our special thanks to:− Josiane Mothe (conference chair)− Adrienne Gaultier− Jose G. Moreno− Nabil El Malki− Nathalie Neptune− Daria Novoseltseva− Md Zia Ullah
We also thank Nicola Ferro for linking the organisers to ACM-SIGIR.

References
Iván Cantador, Massimo Melucci, Max Chevalier, and Josiane Mothe. Circle 2020-the first joint
conference of the information retrieval communities in europe. In CEUR Workshop Proceedings,
volume 2621, 2020.
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