FIRE has since evolved continuously to meet the new challenges in multilingual information access. It has expanded to include new domains like plagiarism detection, legal information access, mixed script information retrieval and spoken document retrieval to name a few. The FIRE 2017 Doctoral Colloquium will provide doctoral students with a unique opportunity to have substantive interaction with other researchers regarding their proposed dissertation research.

The objectives of the Doctoral Colloquium are:

• To provide a forum where doctoral students can present and discuss their research with experienced IR researchers.
• To provide doctoral students with an opportunity to establish a helpful community, including other doctoral students at a similar stage of their dissertation work.

The Colloquium will take place on Saturday 9 December 2017 , with the format including: student presentations with plenary discussions, individual meetings with experienced researchers, and highly interactive networking sessions in breaks .

Prospective attendees should have written, or be close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent). It is desirable that students not be so close to completion that the event would have little impact on their work. Before submitting, students should discuss with their advisor or supervisor.

Candidates for the Colloquium will be selected based on the potential of their research for future impact on the field of information retrieval and the likely benefit to the student of participation in the Colloquium. 
For each selected student, a one page extended abstract of the paper will be published in the FIRE 2017 Conference Proceedings. Extended abstracts will be invited after selection, and should not be submitted with the proposal.

Submission Guidelines

The submitted paper will be the basis for detailed discussions at the Colloquium. To get the most out of the discussion, it should include:

• Motivation for the proposed research.
• Background and related work (including key references).
• Description of proposed research, including main research questions.
• Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate).
• Specific research issues for discussion at the Doctoral Colloquium.

In addition, a one page appendix to the paper (placed after the references) should include the following:

• A detailed statement by the student explaining why they want to participate in the FIRE 2017 Doctoral Colloquium at this point in their doctoral studies, and how they hope it will contribute to the development of the development of their work and potential future career.
• A statement by the student’s advisor/supervisor saying how the student would benefit by attending the Colloquium. Advisors should also specifically state whether the student has written, or is close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent), and when they expect the student would defend their dissertation if they progress at a typical rate.

Format Requirements

• Submissions must be written in English and submitted in the ACM Conference style (for LaTeX, use the Option 2 style) the 2017 ACM Master Article Template (for LaTeX, use the “sigconf” option).  The paper should be no more than 5 pages in length including all figures and references, but not including the one page appendix. The first page must contain the title of the paper, full author name, affiliation and contact details, an abstract of up to 250 words, ACM Computing Classification System (CCS) categories, and up to 3 keywords describing the topic areas. Information about categories and keywords can be found in ACM Web pages on the computing classification system and in the LaTeX and Word templates.
• Doctoral Colloquium papers will not be published in the SIGIR Conference Proceedings; only one-page extended abstract invited from selected students will be published.
• Doctoral Colloquium submissions must be in PDF format and submitted via Easychair FIRE 2017 doctoral Colloquium. It is the responsibility of the student to ensure that their submissions use no unusual format features and are printable on a standard printer. Submissions will be reviewed by the members of the Doctoral Colloquium Program Committee.

Important Dates 

Doctoral Colloquium Chair

Namita Mittal, MNIT jaipur 
Email: nmittal.cse@mnit.ac.in

Overall Co-ordinators

Mandar Mitra, ISI Kolkata 
Prasenjit Majumder, DAIICT Gandhinagar