Report on the SIGIR 2016 Workshop on Neural Information Retrieval (Neu-IR)

The SIGIR 2016 workshop on Neural Information Retrieval (Neu-IR) took place on 21 July, 2016 in Pisa. The goal of the Neu-IR (pronounced “New IR”) workshop was to serve as a forum for academic and industrial researchers, working at the intersection of information retrieval (IR) and machine learning, to present new work and early results, compare notes on neural network toolkits, share best practices, and discuss the main challenges facing this line of research. In total, 19 papers were presented, including oral and poster presentations. The workshop program also included a session on invited “lightning talks” to encourage participants to share personal insights and negative results with the community. The workshop was well-attended with more than 120 registrations.