Preface

Namaste! Welcome to FIRE 2018.

This is a special year because we celebrate the 10th meeting of the Forum for Information
Retrieval Evaluation. Started in 2008 with the aim of building a South Asian counterpart for
TREC, CLEF and NTCIR, FIRE has since then evolved continuously to meet the new
challenges in multilingual information access. During these ten years 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.

In this 10th anniversary we had 6 evaluation tracks: Information Retrieval from Microblogs
during Disasters (IRMiDis), Indian Native Language Identification (INLI), Information
Extractor for Conversational Systems in Indian Languages (IECSIL), Multilingual Author
Profiling on SMS Messages (MAPonSMS), Event Extraction from Newswires and Social
Media Text in Indian Languages (EventXtract-IL), and Verb Phrase Translation in English
and Indian languages (VPT-IL). In this volume every track is described in detail, where the
corresponding overview paper gives figures on the participating teams and discusses the
obtained results.

This edition of FIRE was held in Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and
Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gujarat, India (http://fire.irsi.res.in/fire/2018/). The
meeting has been an occasion for the participants to present their approaches and results and
to share ideas through oral and poster presentations. We thank all the people and institutions
involved in the organisation of the tracks, and all the participants, who contributed to the
success of the event. A special thank is due to our sponsors: ACM In-Cooperation, ACM
SIGIR Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, Google, Microsoft and Rygbee Inc.

December 2018


                                                                                  Parth Mehta
                                                                                  Paolo Rosso
                                                                           Prasenjit Majumder
                                                                                Mandar Mitra