Advances in InformationRetrievalTheory

These proceedings contain the refereed papers and posters presented at the Second International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2009), held at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, September 10–11, 2009. This biennial international conference provides an opportunity for the presentation of the latest work describing theoretical advances in the field of information retrieval (IR). The first ICTIR was held in Budapest in October 2007, organized by Keith van Rijsbergen, Sándor Dominich, Sándor Darányi, and Ferenc Kiss. ICTIR was brought about by the growing interest in the consecutive workshops run at ACM SIGIR each year from 2000 until 2005 on Mathematical and Formal Methods in IR (Athens, Greece, 2000; New Orleans, USA, 2001; Tampere, Finland, 2002; Toronto, Canada, 2003; Sheffield, UK, 2004; Salvador, Brazil, 2005). This sustained initiative was in a large part down to the …