This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on the
Theory of Information Retrieval ICTIR 2009 held in Cambridge UK in September 2009. The 18
revised full papers 14 short papers and 11 posters presented together with one invited talk
were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers are categorized into four
main themes: novel IR models evaluation efficiency and new perspectives in IR. Twenty-one
papers fall into the general theme of novel IR models ranging from various retrieval models
query and term selection models Web IR models developments in novelty and diversity to the
modeling of user aspects. There are four papers on new evaluation methodologies e.g. modeling
score distributions evaluation over sessions and an axiomatic framework for XML retrieval
evaluation. Three papers focus on the issue of efficiency and offer solutions to improve the
tractability of PageRank data cleansing practices for training classifiers and approximate
search for distributed IR. Finally four papers look into new perspectives of IR and shed light
on some new emerging areas of interest such as the application and adoption of quantum theory
in IR.
