Information Retrieval Technology 4th Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, AIRS 2008, Harbin, China, January 15-18, 2008, Revised Selected Papers

AsiaInformationRetrievalSymposium(AIRS)2008wasthefourthAIRSconf- ence in the series established in 2004.The ?rst AIRS washeld in Beijing, China, the second in Jeju, Korea, and the third in Singapore. The AIRS conferences trace their roots to the successful Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops, which started in 1996. The AIRS series aims to bring together international researchers and dev- opers to exchange new ideas and the latest results in information retrieval. The scope of the conference encompasses the theory and practice of all aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video, and multimedia data. We are pleased to report that AIRS 2006 receiveda largenumber of 144 s- missions. Submissions came from all continents: Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Africa. We accepted 39 submissions as regular papers (27%) and 45 as short papers (31%). All submissions underwent double-blind revi- ing. We aregratefulto all the area Co-chairswho managedthe review processof their respective area e?ciently, as well as to all the Program Committee m- bers and additional reviewers for their e?orts to get reviews in on time despite the tight time schedule. We are pleased that the proceedings are published by Springer as part of their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series and that the papers are EI-indexed.