SIGIR presents a best paper and a best student paper award at the awards presentation during the conference banquet.

The process followed for the selection of the best papers is described below. During the paper review process, program committee members and Senior PCs nominate papers. These are being discussed at the PC meeting and the Program Chairs with the input of SPCs finalize the list of nominated papers. Then, a best paper awards committee is being formed. The Program and Conference Chairs select members for this committee from the pool of SPCs that have no conflicts of interest. The nominated papers are then forwarded to the awards committee for their deliberations. The committee is charged to identify the best paper. If the best paper happens to be written by a student first author, then only one award is given that covers both the best paper and best student paper. Otherwise, two awards are given.

The 2010 Best paper award nominations are:

• A comparison of general vs personalized affective models for the prediction of topical relevance, I. Arapakis, K. Athanasakos, J. Jose
• Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs, R. White, J. Huang
• Caching Search Engine Results over Incremental Indices, F. Junqueira, R. Blanco, E. Bortnikov, R. Lempel, L. Telloli, H. Zaragoza
• Comparing the Sensitivity of Information Retrieval Metrics, F. Radlinski, N. Craswell
• Extending Average Precision to Graded Relevance Judgments, S. Robertson, E. Kanoulas, E. Yilmaz
• Information Based Model for ad hoc information retrieval, S. Clinchant, E. Gaussier
• Multi-style language model for web scale information retrieval, K. Wang, J. Gao, X. Li
• Properties of Optimally Weighted Data Fusion in CBMIR, P. Wilkins, A. Smeaton

The list of past best paper award recipients are listed from the links below:

• The Best Paper Award is presented to the individual(s) judged by an awards committee to have written the best paper appearing in the annual conference proceedings.

• The Best Student Paper is presented to the author of the best paper written solely or primarily by a student.