Preface

FIRE was organized for the 9th time in 2017 at Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore. Since its inception in 2008, the FIRE community has grown in
stature and has played a prominant role in conducting Information Retrieval
Evaluation in South Asia.

We hosted 5 tracks in 2017, besides the newly introduced doctoral
consortium. Following tracks were a part of FIRE 2017:

      Gender Identification in Russian Texts
      Information retrieval from microblogs during disaster
      Information retrieval from legal documents
      Indian native language identification
      Event Extraction from newswires and social media text in Indian
       Languages

FIRE 2017 saw the introduction of a doctoral consortium, where PhD students
were invited to present their current and planned work, and get feedback
from the IR community. We received 6 submissions in this pilot version out
which 4 were included in this proceedings. This year also saw the inclusion of
Russian for the first time in FIRE. This along with Persian and Arabic,
introduced in previous editions of FIRE, extends the scope of FIRE beyond
Indian languages.

This year, we saw participation from 36 teams participating over these five
tracks. We express our heartfelt gratitude to the track organizers for taking
pains in organizing these interesting tracks and thus presenting exciting
research problems to the community.

We look forward to continuing this endeavour with the able support from
some of the leading research groups in the fraternity. It will be a major
success of FIRE if the data and experiments reported in FIRE and beyond
contribute to the dissemination of knowledge in the information access
research community worldwide.


                                                       Prasenjit Majumder
                                                             Mandar Mitra
                                                               Parth Mehta
                                                      Jainisha Sankhavara