FIRE 2026

The 18th meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) will be held at Dhirubhai Ambani University (DAU), Gandhinagar, India. Since its inception in 2008, FIRE has been envisioned as a South Asian counterpart to TREC, CLEF, and NTCIR, providing a common platform for rigorous evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems and fostering a vibrant research community in the region.

Over the years, FIRE has continuously evolved to address emerging challenges in multilingual and multimodal information access, large-scale evaluation frameworks, and the growing intersection of IR with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and related AI technologies. With a strong focus on real-world relevance, FIRE has served as a unique forum that brings together researchers from academia and practitioners from industry, enabling exchange of ideas, methods, datasets, and evaluation practices.

In its 18th edition, FIRE will continue to build on this legacy through three complementary tracks:

Peer-Reviewed Conference Track: Encouraging high-quality, original research contributions, with a special emphasis on early-stage researchers and doctoral students, providing them a supportive platform to present and discuss novel ideas.

Evaluation and Benchmarking Track: Featuring carefully designed evaluation campaigns to advance the state of the art in IR, NLP, and multilingual technologies, enabling systematic comparison of methods on common datasets and benchmarks.

Industry Track: Showcasing real-world deployments, case studies, and challenges faced by industry, and highlighting how IR and AI research is transforming applications at scale.

FIRE 2026 at DAU aims to strengthen its role as a premier evaluation forum in Asia, nurturing collaboration across institutions, disciplines, and sectors, and contributing to the development of robust, inclusive, and impactful information access technologies for a multilingual world.

Note : Non-Indian nationals would require visas