Introduction to the special issue on the 27th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research

Abstract

This special issue contains the extended versions of six among the best papers presented at the 27th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research (ECIR 2005). This conference was initially established by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (BCS-IRSG) under the name “Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research.” The colloquium was held in the United Kingdom each year until 1998, when the event was organised in Grenoble, France. Since then the conference venue has alternated between the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, reflecting the growing European orientation of ECIR. For the same reason, in 2001 the event was renamed “European Conference on Information Retrieval Research.” In recent years, ECIR has continued to grow and has become the major European forum for the discussion of research in the field of Information Retrieval. Since 2002, the proceedings of this conference are being published by Springer Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. ECIR 2005, celebrated in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) on 21–23 March 2005, was jointly organized by the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and the University of Granada (Spain), under the auspices of the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society. The conference was co-chaired by David E. Losada (University of Santiago de Compostela) and Juan M. Fernandez-Luna (University of Granada) and the conference venue was the Technical School of Engineering of the University of Santiago de Compostela. In terms of submissions, ECIR 2005 was a record-breaking success, since