SIGIR is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval.

The scope of the group's specialty is the theory and application of computers to the acquisition, organization, storage, retrieval and distribution of information; emphasis is placed on working with non-numeric information, ranging from natural language to highly structured data bases.

The annual international SIGIR conference, which began in 1978, is considered the most important in the field of information retrieval.

This award is selected from a set of full papers presented at the main SIGIR conference 10–12 years before.

These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the discipline and/or industry through significant research, innovation, and/or service.