This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2016, held in Beijing, China, in November/December 2016. The 21 full papers presented together with 11 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The final programme of AIRS 2015 is divided in the following tracks: IR models and theories; machine learning and data mining for IR; IR applications and user modeling; personalization and recommendation; and IR evaluation.