Call for papers

The journalism industry has undergone a revolution in the past decade, leading to new opportunities as well as challenges. News consumption, production and delivery have all been affected and transformed by technology. Readers require new mechanisms to cope with the vast volume of information in order to be informed. Reporters have begun to use natural language processing and information retrieval (IR) techniques (search engines, recommender systems, etc.) for investigative work. Publishers and aggregators are seeking new business models, and new ways to reach and retain their audience. A shift in business models has led to a gradual shift in styles of journalism in attempts to increase page views; and, far more concerning, to real mis- and dis-information. Social media platforms drive viewers in a heavily personalized manner, creating filter bubbles and an increasingly polarized readership.
The aforementioned opportunities and challenges have attracted much research recently in the IR and in many other communities, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). Building on the success of its two previous versions, the main goal of NewsIR’19 is to bring together experts from both the technology side (mainly experts in IR, NLP and ML), and the journalism side. The objective is to stimulate discussion around the current challenges in the journalism and news processing environment and to combine the expertise of these communities. NewsIR will be hosted as part of SIGIR, the biggest international conference on information retrieval - this year hosted in Paris.
We solicit submissions from both communities on the challenges identified above. As this is a workshop bringing together professionals from different domains, we welcome both, technical papers (4 pages) as well as demos and position papers (2 pages). Submissions for demos and position papers, especially from contributors in the journalism community, do not need to be technical in nature. They do need to explain the application area to an audience that is not specialised in journalistic methods, and highlight the potential of this area to be developed further by computational methods.

Topics of interest include - but are not limited to:

Investigative and Data Journalism


Fake News, Fact-checking and Controversy


Information within News Text


News Recommendation, social media and the filter bubble

workshop structure

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their papers orally at the workshop and also to present them in an interactive poster session, designed to encourage greater discussion and engagement.

Submission Details

Please visit this page for details on format and how to submit your paper.

If you have any further questions, you can reach out via email to [email protected]