The European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) is the prime European forum for the presentation of original research in the field of Information Retrieval. The 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026) will take place as a physical (in-person) conference from 29 March to 2 April 2026 in Delft, The Netherlands.

Topics of Interest

ECIR 2026 invites the submission of high-quality and original papers in the broad field of Information Retrieval. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

    Search and ranking, including retrieval models and ranking, query and content analysis, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and theoretical aspects of Information Retrieval;

    Recommender systems, including recommendation algorithms, and advanced recommender systems, covering rich content representations, content analysis, and diverse recommendation techniques such as content-based and collaborative filtering, cross-domain and context-aware methods, and multi-stakeholder approaches;

    User aspects in IR, including information interaction, human-AI collaboration, contextualisation, personalisation, simulation, characterisation, and behaviours;

    System aspects, including retrieval and recommendation architectures, efficiency and scalability;

    Conversational search and recommender systems, focusing on natural language understanding and generation, dialogue management, multimodal interaction, and user engagement in search processes;

    Explainability methods, addressing the transparency, interpretability, and accountability of AI-driven systems, particularly for information retrieval, recommendation, and personalisation;

    Machine Learning and Large Language Models for information retrieval and recommendation, IR in agentic workflows;

    Applications, such as web search, web and social media apps, professional and domain-specific search, novel interfaces to search tools, intelligent search, multimodal search and conversational agents;

    Evaluation research, including new metrics, benchmarks and novel methods for the measurement and evaluation of retrieval and/or recommendation systems, users, and/or applications;

    Societally-motivated IR research, including on algorithmic bias and fairness, misinformation, hate speech, interpretability and explainability, privacy-aware IR, trustworthy IR, and ethics;  Please note: This year, we are revamping the dedicated IR-for-Good track to be a core conference track that will run alongside the main conference (not on workshop day). We want this special track to be a platform that highlights top societally-motivated IR research at ECIR. We strongly encourage authors to submit societally-motivated papers to this special track. The call for papers for that track will be released in August.