| Year | Conference | Award | Authors | Paper Title |
| 2023 | SIGIR 2023 | Best Student Paper Award | Alireza Salemi, Juan Altmayer Pizzorno, Hamed Zamani | A Symmetric Dual Encoding Dense Retrieval Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering |
| 2023 | ICTIR 2023 | Best Paper Award Honorable Mention | Zhiqi Huang, Shahrzad Naseri, Hamed Bonab, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, James Allan | Hierarchical Transformer-based Query by Multiple Documents |
| 2022 | SIGIR 2022 | Best Short Paper Award | Hansi Zeng, Hamed Zamani, Vishwa Vinay | Curriculum Learning for Dense Retrieval Distillation |
| 2022 | SIGIR 2022 | Best Paper Award | Valeriia Bolotova, Vladislav Blinov, Bruce Croft, Mark Sanderson | A non-factoid question answering taxonomy |
| 2021 | NAACL 2021 Trust NLP Workshop | Best Paper Award | Dong-Ho Lee, Ravi Kiran Selvam, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Bill Yuchen Lin, Fred Morstatter, Jay Pujara, Elizabeth Boschee, James Allan, Xiang Ren | AutoTriggER:Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Trigger Extraction |
| 2020 | CIKM 2020 | Best Paper Award (Full Paper Research Track) | Valeriya Bolotova-Baranova, Vladislav Blinov, Yukun Zheng, Mark Sanderson, Falk Scholer, Bruce Croft | Do People and Neural Networks Pay Attention to the Same Words? Studying Eye-tracking Data for Non-factoid QA Evaluation |
| 2020 | CIKM 2020 | Best Paper Award (Resource Track) | Hamed Zamani, Gord Lueck, Everest Chen, Rodolfo Quispe, Flint Luu, Nick Craswel | MIMICS: A Large-Scale Data Collection for Search Clarification |
| 2019 | ICTIR 2019 | Best Full Paper Award | Daniel Cohen, Scott Jordan, Bruce Croft | Learning a Better Negative Sampling Policy with Deep Neural Networks for Search |
| 2019 | ICTIR 2019 | Best Short Paper Honorable Mention | Helia Hashemi, Hamed Zamani, Bruce Croft | Performance Prediction for Non-Factoid Question Answering |
| 2019 | ECIR 2019 | Test of Time Award | Xing Yi ('11), James Allan | A Comparative Study of Utilizing Topic Models for Information Retrieval (2009 ECIR paper) |
| 2019 | ECIR 2019 | Best Application Short Paper | Youngwoo Kim, James Allan | Unsupervised Explainable Controversy Detection from Online News |
| 2019 | EMNLP 2019 -IJCNLP (Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering) | Best Paper Award, MRQA | Ameya Godbole, Dilip Kavarthapu, Rajarshi Das, Zhiyu Gong, Abhishek Singhal, Hamed Zamani, Mo Yu, Tian Gao, Xiaoxiao Guo, Manzil Zaheer, Andrew McCallum | Multi-step Entity-centric Information Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answering |
| 2018 | SIGIR 2018 | Best Short Paper Award | Daniel Cohen, Bhaskar Mitra. Katja Hofmann, Bruce Croft | Cross Domain Regularization for Neural Ranking Models using Adversarial Learning |
| 2018 | SIGIR 2018 | Test of Time Award Honorable Mention | Xing Wei (Ph.D. '07), Bruce Croft | LDA-based document models for ad-hoc retrieval (2006 paper) |
| 2017 | SIGIR 2017 | Test of Time Award Honorable Mention | Donald Metzler (Ph.D. '07), Bruce Croft | A Markov random field model for term dependencies (2005 paper) |
| 2017 | ACM CHIIR 2017 | Best Student Paper Award | Jiepu Jiang, Daqing He, Diane Kelly, James Allan | Understanding Ephemeral State of Relevance |
| 2016 | SIGIR 2016 | Test of Time Award | Victor Lavrenko, W. B. Croft | Relevance based Language Models (2001 paper) |
| 2016 | SIGIR 2016 | Test of Time Award | Jay M. Ponte, W. B. Croft | A Language Modeling Approach to Information Retrieval (1998 paper) |
| 2016 | SIGIR 2016 | Test of Time Award | James Allan, Ron Papka, Victor Lavrenko | On-line New Event Detection and Tracking (1998 paper) |
| 2016 | SIGIR 2016 | Test of Time Award | Jinxi Xu, W. B. Croft | Query Expansion using Local and Global Document Analysis (1996 paper) |
| 2016 | SIGIR 2016 | Test of Time Award | Jamie Callan, Zhihong Lu, W. B. Croft | Searching Distributed Collections with Inference Networks (1995 paper) |
| 2016 | SIGIR 2016 | Test of Time Award | Howard Turtle, W. B. Croft | Inference Networks for Document Retrieval (1990 paper) |
| 2015 | SIGIR 2015 | Test of Time Award Honorable Mention Award | Jiwoon Jeon, Victor Lavrenko, R. Manmatha | Automatic image annotation and retrieval using cross-media relevance models (2003 paper) |
| 2015 | ACL 2015 | Outstanding Paper Award | Emma Strubell, Luke Vilnis, Kate Silverstein, Andrew McCallum | Learning Dynamic Feature Selection for Fast Sequential Prediction |
| 2014 | SIGIR 2014 | Test of Time Award Honorable Mention Award | Steve Cronen-Townsend, Yun Zhou, W. Bruce Croft | Predicting query performance (2002 paper) |
| 2014 | NIPS 2014 (4th Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction - AKBC 2014) | Outstanding Paper Award | Arvind Neelakantan, Benjamin Roth, Andrew McCallum | Knowledge Base Completion using Compositional Vector Space Models |
| 2013 | ICDAR 2013 | Best Poster Paper Award | David Wemhoener, Zeki Yalniz, R. Manmatha | Creating an Improved Version Using Noisy OCR from Multiple Editions |
| 2012 | WSDM 2012 | Runner-Up Best Paper Award | Michael Bendersky, Donald Metzler, W. B. Croft | Effective Query Formulation with Multiple Information Sources |
| 2011 | SIGIR 2011 | Best Paper Honorable Mention Award | Michael Bendersky, Donald Metzler, W. B. Croft | Parameterized Concept Weighting in Verbose Queries |
| 2011 | CIKM 2011 (BooksOnline Workshop) | Best Paper Award | Marc-Allen Cartright, Henry A. Feild, James Allan | Evidence Finding using a Collection of Books |
| 2011 | ICML 2011 | Test of Time Award | John Lafferty, Andrew McCallum, Fernando C. N. Pereira | Conditional Random Fields: Probabilistic Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data (2001 paper) |
| 2010 | PAKDD 2010 | Best Paper Runner-Up | Pallika H. Kanani, Andrew McCallum, Shaohan Hu | Resource-bounded Information Extraction: Acquiring Missing Feature Values On Demand |
| 2009 | ICTIR 2009 | Best Paper Award | Ben Carterette (Ph.D. '08) | An Analysis of NP-Completeness in Novelty and Diversity Ranking |
| 2008 | ISCA 2008 | Most Influential Paper Award | Maurice P. Herlihy, J. Eliot B. Moss | Transactional Memory: Architectural Support for Lock-Free Data Structures (1993 paper) |
| 2006 | SIGIR 2006 | Best Paper Award | Ben Carterette, James Allan, Ramesh Sitaraman | Minimal Test Collections for Retrieval Evaluation |
| 2006 | SIGIR 2006 | Best Student Paper Award (also Best Paper Award) | Ben Carterette, James Allan, Ramesh Sitaraman | Minimal Test Collections for Retrieval Evaluation |
| 2005 | SIGIR 2005 | Best Student Paper Award | Donald Metzler, Bruce Croft | A Markov random field model for term dependencies |
| 2004 | User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research (UMUAI) | 2004 James Chen Annual Award for Best Journal Article | Anton Leuski, James Allan | Interactive Information Retrieval Using Clustering and Spatial Proximity |
| 2004 | AAAI 2004 | Honorable Mention Award | Trausti Kristjannson, Aron Culotta, Paul Viola, Andrew McCallum | Interactive Information Extraction with Constrained Conditional Random Fields |
| 2001 | SIGIR 2001 | Best Paper Award | James Allan, Rahul Gupta, Vikas Khandelwal | Temporal Summaries of News Topics |
| 1999 | ATAL 1999 (6th Intl. Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages) | Best Student Paper Award | Ping Xuan, Victor Lesser | Incorporating Uncertainty in Agent Commitments |
| 1998 | SIGIR 1998 | Best Paper Award | Warren Greiff | A theory of term weighting based on exploratory data analysis |
| 1997 | SIGIR 1997 | Best Student Paper Award | Lisa Ballesteros, Bruce Croft | Phrasal translation and query expansion techniques for cross-language information retrieval |
| 1995 | SIGIR 1995 | Best Student Paper Award (co-winner) | Eric Brown | Fast evaluation of structured queries for information retrieval |
| bold denotes CIIR researcher |