Awards
SIGIR presents three awards. The Gerard Salton Award is presented every three years to an individual who has made "... significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval". The Best Paper Award is presented to the individual(s) judged by a separate awards committee to have written the best paper appearing in the annual conference proceedings. The Best Student Paper is presented to the author of the best paper written solely or primarily by a student.
SIGIR also co-sponsors (with SIGWEB) the Vannevar Bush award, for the best paper at the JCDL conference.
Gerard Salton Award
This award honors those who have made "... significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval".
| Year | Honoree | Presentation Lecture |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Norbert Fuhr
|
"Information Retrieval as Engineering Science""For pioneering, sustained, and continuing contributions to the theoretical foundations of information retrieval and database systems. His work describing how learning methods can be used with retrieval models and indexing anticipated the current interest in learning ranking functions, his development of probabilistic retrieval models for database systems and XML was ground-breaking, and his recent work on retrieval models for interactive retrieval has inspired new research. His rigorous approach to research and research methods is an outstanding example for our field." |
| 2009 | Susan Dumais
|
"An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Information Retrieval""For nearly thirty years of significant, sustained, and continuing contributions to research, for exceptional mentorship, and for leadership in bridging the fields of information retrieval and human computer interaction. Her contributions to both the theoretical development and practical implementations of Latent Semantic Indexing, question-answering, desktop search, combining search and navigation, and incorporating the user and their context, have all substantially advanced and enriched the field of Information Retrieval." |
| 2006 |
C.J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen
|
"Quantum haystacks""This acceptance talk is a curious mixture of personal history and developing ideas in the context of the growing field of IR covering several decades. I want to concentrate on models and theories, interpreted loosely, and try and give an insight into where I have got to in my thinking, where the ideas came from, and where I believe we are going. In the last few years I have been working on the development of what might be coined as a design language for IR. It takes its inspiration from Quantum Mechanics, but by analogy only. The mathematical objects represent documents; these objects might be vectors (or density operators) in an n-dimensional vector space (usually a Hilbert space)." |
| 2003 |
W. Bruce Croft
|
"Information Retrieval and Computer Science: An Evolving Relationship"For... "More than twenty years of significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. His contributions to the theoretical development and practical use of Bayesian inference networks and language modelling for retrieval, and to their evaluation through extensive experiment and application, are particularly important. The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval which he founded illustrates the strong synergies between fundamental research and its application to a wide range of practical information management problems." |
| 2000 |
Stephen Robertson
|
"On theoretical argument in information retrieval"SIGIR Forum, 34 (1), 1-10 (April 2000)For... "Thirty years of significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. Of special importance are the theoretical and empirical contributions to the development, refinement, and evaluation of probabilistic models of information retrieval." |
| 1997 |
Tefko Saracevic
|
"Users lost (summary): reflections on the past, future, and limits of information science"SIGIR Forum, 31 (2), 16-27 (Fall 1997).The first part contains personal reflections of the author related to the major events and issues that formed his professional life and research agenda. The second, and major part, considers the broad aspects of information science as a field: origin, problems addressed, areas of study, structure, specialties, paradigm splits, and education problems. The third part discusses the limits of information science in terms of internal limits imposed by the activities in the field and external limits imposed by the very human nature of information processing and use. Throughout, issues related to users and use are transposed, as being of primary concern. |
| 1994 |
William Cooper
|
"The formalism of probability theory in IR: a foundation or an encumbrance?"Probabilistic theories of retrieval bring to bear on the information search problem a high degree of theoretical coherence and deductive power. In principle, this power ought to be an invaluable asset. In practice, it has turned out to be a mixed blessing. The question considered here is whether the trappings of the probabilistic formalism strengthen or encumber IR research on balance. |
| 1991 |
Cyril Cleverdon (1914-1997) 
|
"The significance of the Cranfield tests on index languages"See also Journal of Documentation 54(3), June 1998, 265-280. |
| 1988 |
Karen Spärck Jones (1935-2007) 
|
"A look back and a look forward"This paper is in two parts, following the suggestion that I first comment on my own past experience in information retrieval, and then present my views on the present and future. |
| 1983 |
Gerard Salton (1927-1995) 
|
"About the future of automatic information retrieval"See also SIGIR Forum 31(1) Salton memorial issue. |
SIGIR Best Paper Award
The Best Paper Award is presented to the individual(s) judged by an awards committee to have written the best paper appearing in the annual conference proceedings.
SIGIR Best Student Paper Award
The Best Student Paper is presented to the author of the best paper written solely or primarily by a student.
| Year | Authors | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Shuzi Niu Jiafeng Guo Yanyan Lan Xueqi Cheng |
Top-k learning to rank: labeling, ranking and evaluation Selected for proposing a novel top-k labeling strategy for efficiently obtaining labeled data for learning to rank in information retrieval and proposing a novel learning to rank method to effectively learn from such a new form of relevance judgments. |
| 2011 | Shuang-Hong Yang Bo Long Alexander J. Smola Hongyuan Zha Zhaohui Zheng |
Collaborative Competitive Filtering: Learning Recommender using Context of User Choice |
| 2010 |
Ioannis Arapakis (student) Konstantinos Athanasakos Joemon M. Jose |
A Comparison of General vs. Personalized Affective Models for the Prediction of Topical Relevance |
| 2009 |
Jaime Arguello (student) Fernando Diaz Jamie Callan Jean-Francois Crespo |
Sources of evidence for vertical selection |
| 2008 | Yuting Liu Bin Gao Tie-Yan Liu Ying Zhang Zhiming Ma Shuyuan He Hang Li |
BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance |
| 2007 |
D. Sculley (student) Gabriel Wachman (student) |
Relaxed online Support Vector Machines for spam filtering |
| 2006 |
Ben Carterette (student) James Allan Ramesh Sitaraman |
Minimal Test Collections for Retrieval Evaluation |
| 2005 |
Donald Metzler (student) Bruce Croft |
A Markov random field model for term dependencies |
| 2004 |
Hui Fang Tao Tao ChengXiang Zhai |
A Formal Study of Information Retrieval Heuristics |
| 2003 |
Stefanie Tellex (student) Boris Katz Jimmy Lin Aaron Fernandes Gregory Marton |
Quantitative evaluation of passage retrieval algorithms for question answering |
| 2002 |
Yi Zhang (student) Jamie Callan Thomas Minka |
Novelty and redundancy detection in adaptive filtering |
| 2001 |
Adnike Lam-Adesina (student) Gareth Jones |
Applying Summarization Techniques for Term Selection in Relevance Feedback |
| 2000 |
Ilmerio Reis da Silva (student) Berthier Ribeiro-Neto Pavel Calado (student) Edleno Moura Nivio Ziviani |
Link-based and content-based evidential information in a belief network model. |
| 1999 |
Owen de Kretser Alistair Moffat |
Efficient document presentation with a locality-based similarity heuristic |
| 1998 |
Martin Wechsler Eugen Munteanu Peter Schaeuble |
New techniques for open-vocabulary spoken document retrieval |
| 1997 |
Lisa Ballesteros Bruce Croft |
Phrasal translation and query expansion techniques for cross-language information retrieval |
| 1996 |
Amit Singhal Chris Buckley Mandar Mitra |
Pivoted length document normalization |
|
1995 co-winners |
Hinrich Schuetze Jan Pedersen David Hull |
A comparison of classifiers and document representations for the routing problem. |
|
Eric Brown> |
Fast evaluation of structured queries for information retrieval. |
SIGIR Best Poster Award
| Year | Authors | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| 1999 |
Michael Witbrock Vibhu Mittal |
Ultra-summarization: A statistical approach to generating highly condensed non-extractive summaries |
| 1998 |
Ming-Jer Lee Lee-Feng Chien |
Automatic acquisition of phrasal knowledge for English-Chinese bilingual information retrieval |
| 1997 |
K. Ng V. Zue |
An investigation of subword unit representations for spoken document retrieval |
SIGIR Doctoral Consortium Award
| Year | Authors | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 (co-winners) | Krisztian Balog | People search in the enterprise |
| Georg Buscher | Attention-based information retrieval | |
| 2006 | Jun Wang |
Probabilistic Relevance Models for Collaborative Filtering |
| 2005 | Paul McNamee |
Advancing Corpus-Based Bilingual Retrieval |
| 2004 (co-winners) | Jochen Leidner | Toponym Resolution in Text: "Which Sheffield is it?" |
| Paul Ogilvie | Understanding combination of evidence using generative probabilistic models for information retrieval |
Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award
Best paper at the JCDL conference (more information)