Report on the25th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research(ECIR-03)
Fabrizio Sebastiani
Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Pisa, ITE-mail: fabrizio.sebastiani@isti.cnr.it

1Introduction

The 25th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research (ECIR-03 – http://ecir03.isti.cnr.it/)
took place in Pisa, Italy, on 14-16 April, 2003, and was organized by the Italian National Councilof Research.
The ECIR series was initially established by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of
the British Computer Society (BCS-IRSG) under the name “Annual Colloquium on Information
Retrieval Research”, and always held in the United Kingdom until 1997. Since 1998 the locationof the Colloquium has alternated between the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, in orderto reﬂect the growing European orientation of the event. For the same reason, in 2001 the event
was renamed “European Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research”. Since 2002,
the proceedings of the Colloquium are being published by Springer Verlag in their Lecture Notes
in Computer Science series ([1, 2]). As of 2003 BCS-IRSG has decided to rename the event“European Conference on Information Retrieval Research”, in order to reﬂect what the event had
slowly turned into, i.e. a full-blown conference with a European program committee, strong peer
reviewing, and a (mostly) European audience.
ECIR-03, the 25th “Silver Jubilee” edition, represented a record-breaking success. The number of submitted papers was the highest in the series (101), which resulted also in a record-low
acceptance rate (31% for full papers), thus ensuring a high qualitative standard. The numberof participants was also the highest in the series (120), notwithstanding two major international
crises (war in Iraq and SARS) which were rampant at the time and which somehow discouraged
attendance from non-Europeans.
ECIRs have a tradition of being strongly student-oriented events, i.e. settings in which students
and young researchers have the scene mostly for themselves and feel (or should feel) unintimidated
in discussing their ideas with more experienced researchers; many IR researchers from the UK orneighbouring areas have indeed discussed their ﬁrst ideas at the Colloquium, and have since goneon to give major contributions to IR research. In keeping with the tradition, students were verywell represented in ECIR-03, since 20 out of the 31 full papers and 13 out of the 16 short papers
had (and mostly were presented by) a full-time student as the main author. The traditional
student focus of ECIR was also enforced through (i) below-cost registration fees for students;(ii) a rich student grant program, which allowed 26 European students (more than 20% of thetotal attendance of the conference) to be supported by a grant covering registration fee, lunches,banquet, proceedings, and pocket money; and (iii) through the presentation of the Best Student
Paper Award (in keeping with its student focus, ECIR-03 did not have a Best Paper Award). Thisaward, sponsored by Scirus (Elsevier group), was presented to Henrik Nottelmann (Universityof Duisburg-Essen, DE) for his paper “From uncertain inference to probability of relevance foradvanced IR applications”, co-authored by Henrik’s supervisor Norbert Fuhr.

2The keynote talks

In order to mark the Silver Jubilee of ECIR, Karen Spärck Jones (University of Cambridge, UK)gave an initial keynote presentation (titled “Document retrieval: shallow data, deep theories;
historical reﬂections, potential directions”) in which she presented an historical perspective on thedevelopment of statistically based retrieval in the last 40 years and more. Spärck Jones especiallylooked at the consequences of two ideas that, trivial as they make look today, were revolutionary
at the time they were proposed, i.e. (i) that the words occurring in the documents should be
used for representing documents and querying them, and (ii) that the frequency of occurrenceof these words and the distribution of these occurrences in the documents and in the collection
are of key importance for detecting relevant documents. Spärck Jones discussed how these twoideas not only marked the birth of fully automated retrieval (as opposed to the once-current brandof retrieval that required manual indexing of documents) but also formed the basis for most of
the later developments in our ﬁeld, including the most recent ones in Web retrieval and language
modelling.
The second keynote talk (titled “Annotation and Retrieval of Structured Video Documents”)
was given by Alberto del Bimbo (University of Firenze, IT), who gave a broad presentation on hiswork on video annotation for supporting retrieval by content of video segments, and illustrated
this work by drawing examples from a speciﬁc application he has worked on, i.e. the detection andrecognition of soccer highlights. Del Bimbo presented an approach to fully automatic annotationof soccer games videos, based on the automatic recognition of playﬁeld zones and on the detection
and classiﬁcation of other low-level features such as camera motion parameters. He demonstrated
that the resulting system displays an impressive eﬃciency and eﬀectiveness in addressing mid andhigh-level queries about required highlights, thus making it viable for applications (such as the live
broadcasting of sports events) in which editors need to rapidly and eﬀectively access highlights ofvideo material that has just been produced.
The full text of both keynote talks is included in the published Proceedings [2].

3

The papers

A total of 31 full papers and 16 posters were presented at the conference. Collectively, they
are indicative of the wide range of issues being tackled in current IR research, and include boththeoretical and experimental work in several media (text, hypertext, structured text, multi-lingualtext, spoken text, images, music) and in several tasks (search, retrieval, clustering, categorization,
both content-based and collaborative ﬁltering, summarization, information extraction, question
answering, topic detection and tracking, visualization), either in centralized or in distributed
environments, and tackling either eﬀectiveness or eﬃciency issues.
Unsurprisingly, the area with the highest number of papers was that of machine learning(ML) for IR; this conﬁrms a trend which has also been observed at SIGIR conferences, andwhich has forced the SIGIR-04 Program Chairs to nominate no less than four area coordinators(or metareviewers) for this topic. Within the application of ML to IR, the one that has drawn
the largest attention has been text categorization (TC – the only topic which had two sessionsof its own at ECIR-03); among others, approaches to TC based on Kullback-Leibler divergence,
language modelling extensions to Naive Bayes methods, entropy-based discretization of continuous
attributes, or active learning, have been presented. Other subﬁelds of ML&IR were also objectsof presentation; these included collaborative ﬁltering, recommendation technology as applied toon-line store design, clustering for multi-document summarization, information extraction fromspoken documents, and others.
One session was also devoted to formal models and language models of IR, a topic which

in Europe has traditionally enjoyed a special popularity, especially on the formal models side;
presentations discussed large scale evaluations of propositional logical models, new approaches todrawing uncertain inference for IR modelling, and specialized representations of spatio-temporal
information for topic detection and tracking.
A topic which also enjoys a strong popularity in Europe is user studies for IR; one session
was devoted to it, featuring papers on tilebar-like representations for supporting within-documentretrieval, user studies of relevance feedback for image retrieval applications, and tools for thegraphical visualization of Web search results.
A session was also devoted to the applications of natural language engineering to IR; contributions included analyses of the impact of various types of phrase indexing on text categorization,comparative evaluations of stemming and decompounding methods for collections of long documents, analyses of the importance of term proximity for keyword-based search, and linguistic
analysis for question answering applications.
Two topics which have recently been quite popular in the IR community, i.e. Web search andstructured document retrieval, were devoted one session each. The former featured a paper on
hierarchical classiﬁcation of Web pages and two related papers discussing the usefulness of links
for Web search and Web classiﬁcation, a theme which has aroused a lot of interest recently inview of the rather uninspiring results obtained in the TREC Web track by systems making useof link-based information. The latter session included papers on new methods for the retrievalof structured documents, user studies concerning the structured document retrieval task, andexperiences on building test collections for this task.
Finally, a session was devoted to architectural and eﬃciency issues for IR, and dealt withcompression issues for text collections, and data structures in secondary storage for supporting
searches in Web directories or for supporting approximate string processing.
Some topics of traditional IR interest were under-represented in the ECIR-03 program. Forinstance, while text was the focus of attention of the majority of papers, few papers tackledissues in multimedia IR. Since the distribution of the papers across the topics largely reﬂected
the distribution of the submitted papers, this may indicate a smaller degree of activity on thesetopics on the part of European researchers with respect to their non-European colleagues, or atendency from the relevant researchers to submit to other more specialized conferences. Also, while
traditional tasks in text management (e.g. text categorization) had a strong presence, tasks of the
cutting-edge brand such as question answering, topic detection and tracking, and summarization,
had a smaller presence than they have e.g. at recent SIGIR conferences. We all hope that thisfact can stimulate European funding agencies to support European research in these areas morestrongly.
Concerning the geographical distribution of authorship, 77% of the papers indeed came fromEurope, with the United Kingdom (20%), Italy (14%), Spain (11%), and Germany (6%), being
the countries with the highest representation (percentages are calculated by the aﬃliation ofeach co-author). Among the non European papers, Asia was (somehow surprisingly) the mosthighly represented region (14%), while other regions had a smaller representation (4% from North
America, 3% from the Middle East, and 1% from South America). Overall, ECIR-03 authors camefrom a total of 22 diﬀerent countries across the world.

4The panel

The ECIR-03 program also included a panel on “The future of IR research in a European context”,coordinated by Keith van Rijsbergen (University of Glasgow, UK), and with Maristella Agosti(University of Padova, IT), Ayse Göker (Robert Gordon University, UK), Cornelis H.A. Koster(University of Nijmegen, NL), Peter Ingwersen (Royal School of Library and Information Science,DK), and Alan Smeaton (Dublin City University, IE). The panel tackled the role of Europe inthe broader context of IR research, especially in the light of the current funding policy of theCommission of the European Communities, whcih seems to have largely diverted its attentionfrom solid experimental IR in favour of other emerging ﬁelds such as e.g. the “Semantic Web”.

The discussion that followed was very lively, and touched on issues such as the nature and future ofthe ECIR conference series and of the ESSIR (European Summer School on Information Retrieval)
series, and the takeup of IR research results by European companies. A detailed report on thispanel will appear in an upcoming issue of the Informer, the on-line newsletter of the BCS-IRSG(http://irsg.eu.org/).
The proceedings of ECIR-03 [2] are available from Springer Verlag at the price of 70 Euro.
A special issue of the Information Retrieval journal (Kluwer Academic Publishers) devoted toECIR-03 is also forthcoming in early 2004, which will contain substantially revised and extended
versions of seven among the papers that were ranked higher by the ECIR-03 Program Committee.
The next edition of ECIR (http://ecir04.sunderland.ac.uk/) will take place at the University ofSunderland, UK, from April 5 to 7, 2004, and will be organized by Sharon McDonald and John
Tait.

References[1] Fabio Crestani, Mark Girolami, and Cornelis J. van Rijsbergen (eds.). Proceedings of the 24thEuropean Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research, Glasgow, UK, 2002. Published bySpringer Verlag, Heidelberg, DE, as volume n. 2291 in the Lecture Notes in Computer Scienceseries.
[2] Fabrizio Sebastiani (ed.). Proceedings of the 25th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, Pisa, IT, 2003. Published by Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, DE, as volume n.
2633 in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.