Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Welcome to the 43rd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2020). SIGIR is the premier scientific conference in the broad area of information retrieval. According to the original plan, SIGIR 2020 would be held at Hyatt Regency in Xi'an, China. Xi'an, known by most people as home to Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin, is one of the oldest cities in China, having held the position under 13 dynasties and being the starting point of the Silk Road. The beautiful Hyatt hotel was also carefully chosen after we had site visits for more than 15 local hotels and done frequent communications with experts and professionals across academia, government and industry. Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, the organizing committee of SIGIR 2020 decided to move this year's SIGIR fully online in April. Thus, our conference this year becomes the first virtual one in SIGIR history. This last-minute change of the conference posed many challenges and much burden in terms of preparation and sponsorships. Despite the shortened time period and challenges, General Chairs, Vice Chair and their local organizing team worked very diligently to carefully prepare an outstanding program for everyone. This year SIGIR has received a record high number of submissions in its history, as shown in the following statistics. This trend suggests a renewed interest in our field. We were happy to observe the highest number of submissions for long, short, industry track and demo papers, which sums up to 1,180 papers. The accepted papers were made by 1,221 authors from 32 countries. - 555 and 507 valid submissions for full and short papers respectively - 80 effective submissions for industry track papers plus 38 demo papers submitted - 147 papers were accepted for presentation as full papers (26.49% acceptance rate), 152 were accepted for short papers (29.98%), 22 were accepted as industry track papers (27.50%), and 19 were accepted as demo papers. In addition to above tracks, SIGIR 2020 features 6 keynote speakers, 2 invited talks for this year's industry track - Symposium on IR in Practice (SIRIP), 8 pre-conference tutorials, 8 workshops, and 14 doctoral consortium papers. We are proud of our program and acknowledge the tireless efforts of people who materialized all this together.