Introduction to special issue on the second international conference on the theory of information retrieval

This special issue of the Journal of Information Retrieval contains selected and substantially extended works presented and published at the second International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), held at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, on 10–11 September 2009. The ICTIR conference series is a biennial international conference that provides an opportunity for the presentation of the latest work describing advances in the theoretical and formal aspects of Information Retrieval (IR). The conference is run under the auspices of the British Computer Society’s Information Retrieval Specialist Group and the proceedings are now being published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series by Springer. The first ICTIR was held in Budapest in October 2007, organized by Sándor