[CFP]: FIRE 2025, The 17th Annual meeting of Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation

*Call for Papers*
*FIRE 2025: 17th meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation*
17th - 20th December 2025
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India
*Submission Deadline: 31st August 2025*
Website: fire.irsi.org.in
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The 17th meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation 2025
will be held at Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, 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. Authors are also encouraged to describe work in progress and
late-breaking research results.

*Topics of interest include, but are not limited to*

   1. 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.
   2. 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.
   3. Generative Models for IR/NLP.
      - Conversational and Interactive Search Systems.
      - Simulated Data for Personalized IR.
      - Issues related to fairness and trustworthiness of IR/Recsys models.
      - 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.
   4. 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.
   5. Multimodal and Crossmodal IR/Recsys model
      - Visual Question Answering
      - Image search/recommendation
      - Question answering
      - Multimodal document summarization



   *Important dates*
   *25th July 2025* Paper submission link
   <https://fire.irsi.org.in/fire/2025/call_for_papers> will be available
   *31st August 2025* Paper submission deadline
   *15th October 2025* Paper acceptance notification
   *5th November 2025 * Camera ready copy submission deadline
   *17th-20th December 2025* 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. If
   the paper being submitted is under review at any other venue, the same
   should be explicitly mentioned when making the submission. Such a paper, if
   accepted, should be withdrawn from all other places.

   The FIRE conference track, this year, is subdivided into 2 different
   subtracks (described later), each with a different scope and objective, and
   with different reviewing policy. Please make sure that you are submitting
   your paper in the correct track. No requests for switching papers across
   tracks will be entertained after the deadline for paper submission expires.


   Submissions will be taken through Microsoft CMT. Select the "Conference
   Track" while submitting the paper and in the subject area select the
   appropriate paper type (Regular Paper, Resource and Demo Paper, Extended
   Abstract). Please note that incorrect submission will be desk rejected.



   *Paper Template and Submission*

   The submitted papers must follow ACM ICPS template available on
   https://authors.acm.org/proceedings/production-information/overleaf .
   The only accepted format of submissions is PDF. Papers which do not conform
   to the requirements may get rejected without review. Please note that it is
   the responsibility of the authors to ensure that the PDF submission has
   been uploaded successfully (we suggest that you try downloading your paper
   again yourself, to check). Authors are invited to submit in any of the
   following tracks:
   - *Regular paper*

   As in previos year, we are not making any explicit distinction between
   long and short papers. More time will be allocated for longer papers during
   the presentation.



   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 data or software
   resources towards 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 that demonstrates the
   application of existing or proposed research methods as a proofof-concept.



   Reviewing policy: Single-blind.

   Number of pages: *Variable length* up to a *maximum of 9* pages of *content
   (excluding references).*.



   *Double-blind Reviewing Policy*

   All submissions to the regular track of FIRE conference 2025 will be
   reviewed on the basis of originality, relevance, importance, and clarity.
   For papers submitted to the regular track, the authors must not mention
   their names or institutional details anywhere in the paper. Authors should
   refer to themselves in 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 will have to register for the
   conference and present their 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 (Interaction LLC, India)


   For queries related to conference please email us at [ clia@isical.ac.in,
   fire2025@itbhu.ac.in ]
   For latest updates subscribe the FIRE mailing List [
   https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fire-list ]