Continuing the trend of the IDRBT organising one good international conference every year, the Institute this year had organised the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE 2020) conference jointly with IRSI, ISI Kolkata, DA-IICT, and ACM Gandhinagar professional chapter. Given the current COVID 19 situation, FIRE 2020 was conducted online from December 16-20, 2020.

Started in 2008 with the aim of building a South Asian counterpart for TREC, CLEF, and NTCIR, FIRE has since evolved continuously to meet the new challenges in multilingual information access. 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. The FIRE consists of a peer-reviewed conference track along with evaluation tasks.

This year, Invited Talks were delivered by:

• Adam Wyner, Swansea University, UK on Developing Resources for Legal Information Retrieval
• Ellen M. Voorhees, NIST, USA on TREC-COVID: Building a Pandemic IR Test Collection
• Paul Clough, The University of Sheffield, UK on Algorithmic Bias, Transparency and Fairness: What is it, Why Does it Matter and What’s Being Done About it?
• Ajit Balakrishnan, Rediff.com, India on Challenges in Deep/Machine Learning in the Indian Legal Domain and some Approaches to the solution

In addition to the conference track, the following ten tracks were also organized:

• Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages (HASOC)
• Artificial Intelligence for Legal Assistance (AILA)
• Authorship Identification of SOurce COde (AI-SOCO)
• Sentiment Analysis of Dravidian Languages in Code-Mixed Text
• Cause-Effect Relation Extraction from Text (CEREX)
• Causality-driven Ad hoc Information Retrieval (CAIR)
• Fake News Detection in the Urdu Language (UrduFake)
• Anaphora Resolution from Social Media Text in Indian Languages
• Event Detection from News in Indian Languages (EDNIL)

Dr Mridula Verma, IDRBT and Dr Sandip Modha, IRSI & DA-IICT were the Organising Chairs of FIRE 2020.