Call for Papers Special Issue on Axiomatic Thinking for Information Retrieval Information Retrieval Journal, Springer https://goo.gl/dWvMJb Recent growth of work on applying axiomatic thinking to analyze and improve both retrieval models and evaluation metrics has clearly demonstrated many advantages of axiomatic thinking, including particularly specific theoretical results in the form of novel constraints to be satisfied by retrieval functions or evaluation metrics and improved models or evaluation metrics. This body of existing work opens up many promising new research directions, especially in applying axiomatic thinking more broadly to many problems in information retrieval. Since there is not yet a single source for researchers to use for understanding the state of the art of research in axiomatic thinking for information retrieval, a main goal of this special issue is to fill in this gap through accepting a set of representative papers that apply axiomatic thinking to various tasks in information retrieval and related application areas. In particular, we especially welcome submissions that (1) develop a general axiomatic framework to IR related tasks; (2) study how to apply axiomatic thinking to a specific task; (3) combine axiomatic thinking with other methodology such as learning-to- rank; and (4) discuss the past and future of the axiomatic thinking (i.e., position papers). * TOPICS OF INTEREST Topics of interest include, but are not limited to applying axiomatic thinking to:  - Retrieval models  - Evaluation  - Domain specific IR  - Text categorization  - Text clustering  - Natural language processing  - Machine learning  - Human computer interaction  - Multimedia IR  - Cross-language retrieval  - Question answering  - Learning to rank  - User and task modeling * SPECIAL ISSUE GUEST EDITORS Enrique Amigo, UNED, Spain Hui Fang, University of Delaware, USA Stefano Mizzaro, Udine University, Italy ChengXiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA * IMPORTANT DATES  - Initial submissions due: May 30, 2018  - Initial reviewer feedback: July 30, 2018  - Revised submission due: August 30, 2018  - Final reviews and notification: September 30, 2018 * PAPER SUBMISSION Papers submitted to this special issue for possible publication must be original and must not be under consideration for publication in any other journal or conference. Previously published or accepted conference papers must contain at least 30% new material to be considered for the special issue. All papers are to be submitted by referring to http://www.springer.com/10791 (submit online). At the beginning of the submission process in Editorial Manager, under "Article Type", please select the appropriate special issue. All manuscripts must be prepared according to the journal publication guidelines which can also be found on the website provided above.  Papers will be evaluated following the journal's standard review process. For inquiries on the above please contact Hui Fang, hfang@udel.edu. A resource page of axiomatic thinking for IR is available at https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~hfang/AX.html -- Prof. Stefano Mizzaro, PhD Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics University of Udine Via delle Scienze, 206 - 33100 Udine, Italy mizzaro@uniud.it - http://www.dimi.uniud.it/mizzaro/ Ph.: +39 0432 558456 - Fax: +39 0432 558499