CFP : Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation : FIRE 2026
Bhargav Dave
The 18th meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation 2026 will be held at the Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, India. It will be an in-person conference. We are seeking submissions of high-quality and original papers. Submissions will be reviewed by experts on the basis of the originality of the work, the validity of the results, chosen methodology, writing quality and the overall contribution to the field of IR/NLP, though the criteria vary depending on the sub-track. Authors are also encouraged to submit work in progress and late-breaking research results.
A Best Paper Award and a Best Paper Runner-up Award will be presented during the conference.
Authors of selected accepted papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their work for review and possible publication in the Information Retrieval Research Journal (IRRJ) after the conference.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to
- Search and Ranking: Research on core algorithmic topics in IR:
- Queries and query analysis (e.g., Query understanding, query reformulation, query representation etc.)
- Retrieval models and ranking (e.g., Cross lingual IR with a particular focus on Indian languages, ranking algorithms, language models, retrieval algorithms, learning to rank etc.)
- Efficiency and scalability (e.g., distributed search, search engine architecture, indexing, crawling etc.)
- Supervised/Weakly supervised deep neural networks.
- Other domain-specific applications of IR.
- Evaluation: Research on evaluation of IR systems:
- User centric evaluation (e.g., User experience, user engagement etc.)
- System centric evaluation (e.g., Evaluation metrics).
- Query Performance Prediction and its applications.
- Generative Models for IR/NLP.
- Conversational and Interactive Search Systems.
- Simulated Data for Personalized IR.
- In-Context Learning or Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Search and NLP downstream tasks, such as Question Answering, Summarization.
- Domain-specific generation, such as Code generation, Argument generation, Workflow generation.
- Explainability, Fairness and Trust of IR/Recsys models
- Explainable models for ranking, text classification/clustering, summarization etc.
- User studies for explainable AI (XAI) applied to IR/Recsys.
- Issues related to fairness and trustworthiness of IR/Recsys models.
- Multimodal and Crossmodal IR/Recsys model
- Visual and Multimodal Question Answering
- Image Search/Recommendation
- Multimodal Document Summarization
- New and emerging topics:
- IR for Agentic Systems
- Memory Retrieval
Important dates
| 5th July 2026 | Paper submission link will be available |
| 15th August 2026 | Paper submission deadline |
| 15th October 2026 | Paper acceptance notification |
| 31st October 2026 | Camera ready copy submission deadline |
| 17th-20th December 2026 | In-person conference |
Note: All submission deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE Time Zone (Anywhere on Earth).
Submission Guidelines
- Submissions must describe substantial, original, and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis must be included.
- The FIRE Conference Track is divided into three sub-tracks: Regular Papers, Resource and Demo Papers, and Perspective Papers. Each has its own distinct scope, objective, and reviewing policy (described below). Authors should ensure that their submission is made to the appropriate sub-track. Requests to transfer submissions between sub-tracks after the paper submission deadline will not be considered. Submissions that are assigned to an incorrect sub-track may be desk-rejected.
- If the submitted paper is under review at any other venue, this must be explicitly declared during submission. If accepted at FIRE, the paper must be withdrawn from all other venues.
- Authors should provide sufficient information to enable verification of their results, including source code (which must be anonymized for double-blind submissions), datasets (where permissible), and a clear description of the experimental setup. Authors are also encouraged to include a brief reproducibility statement.
- Authors must comply with the ACM Policy regarding the use of generative AI tools. Any use of AI-generated content or AI-assisted writing should be disclosed in the paper.
- Authors are strongly encouraged to provide “alt text” (alternative text) for floats (images, tables, etc.) to make their works more inclusive and accessible, especially to the differently-abled. Authors may consult general ACM guidelines on writing figure descriptions, SIG ACCESS guidelines on describing figures, and ACM Accessibility Recommendations for Publishing in Color for guidance.
Paper Template and Submission
- The submitted papers must follow the ACM ICPS template available at https://authors.acm.org/proceedings/production-information/overleaf (2-column “sigconf” LaTeX template).
LaTeX users should use the following:
Anonymous submission:
\documentclass[sigconf,natbib=true,anonymous=true]{acmart}
Non-anonymous submission:
\documentclass[sigconf,natbib=true]{acmart} - Please consult the LaTeX documentation and ACM’s LaTeX best practices guide for further instructions, ignoring the single-column instructions. Do not use the “manuscript” option, otherwise the document will not be compiled in double-column, as required. To ensure compatibility with The ACM Publishing System (TAPS), please restrict the use of packages to the whitelist of approved LaTeX packages.
- The only accepted format of submissions is PDF. Please note that it is the responsibility of the authors to ensure that the PDF submission has been uploaded successfully (we suggest that you download the uploaded PDF to verify that it was submitted correctly).
- ACM’s CCS concepts and keywords must be included in the paper.
- When submitting a paper, select Conference Track and choose the appropriate paper type (Regular Paper, Resource and Demo Paper, or Perspective Paper) under the Subject Area.
- Authors are invited to submit to any of the following three sub-tracks:
- Regular Paper
We welcome high-impact original papers in the area of IR/NLP. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of originality, technical quality, significance, relevance, and clarity. As in the previous year, we are not making any explicit distinction between long and short papers. However, longer papers will be allocated proportionally more presentation time.
Reviewing policy: Double-blind.
Number of pages: Variable length up to a maximum of 9 pages of content (excluding references).
- Resource and Demo Paper
Papers submitted to this track should describe datasets, software tools, benchmarks, and other research artifacts that address a research problem and are expected to benefit the IR/NLP/AI community. Ideally, such resources should be made publicly available for reviewers to judge their quality and usefulness. The demo papers should contain a link to a working software system that demonstrates the application of existing or proposed research methods as a proof-of-concept.
Reviewing policy: Single-blind.
Number of pages: Variable length up to a maximum of 9 pages of content (excluding references).
- Perspective Paper
This sub-track welcomes papers that challenge conventional thinking in information retrieval and point toward new research directions. We invite bold or early-stage ideas, including new problem framings, critiques of current approaches to IR, and promising new directions, instead of requiring mature systems. Submissions should include a short section explaining the perspective offered. Papers should be argued clearly and, where possible, supported by evidence, analysis, or preliminary experiments. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of the originality and potential impact of the idea, the clarity and rigor of the argument, and the extent to which the perspective challenges or extends current thinking in information retrieval, rather than on the completeness or maturity of the results presented.
Reviewing policy: Double-blind.
Number of pages: Variable length up to a maximum of 9 pages of content (excluding references).
- Submit your paper using the submission link provided at the top of this page. Papers that do not conform to the requirements may get rejected without review.
Double-blind Reviewing Policy
For papers submitted to the Regular/Perspective Paper track, authors must not include any identifying information anywhere in the manuscript, including author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, grant information, project URLs that reveal their identity, or citations to prior work that disclose the authors’ identity. Authors should refer to themselves in the third person when citing their own work. Expressions like "In our earlier work..." or "We previously showed that..." must be avoided.
Presentation Requirements
If accepted, at least one author must register for the conference and present the work in person.
Conference Track Co-ordinator
- Debasis Ganguly (University of Glasgow, UK)
- Debarshi Kumar Sanyal (Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, India)
- Surupendu Prakash Gangopadhyay (Interactions LLC)
For conference-related queries, please email us at [ cl...@isical.ac.in ]
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