PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS SPIRE 2006 - String Processing and Information Retrieval 11-13 October 2006, Glasgow, Scotland http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/spire06/ Submission date: 14 April, 2006 SPIRE 2006 is the 13th Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval. The first four editions focused primarily on string processing and South America, and were called WSP (South American Workshop on String Processing). Starting in 1998, the focus of the workshop was broadened to include the area of information retrieval due to its increasing relevance and its inter-relationship with the area of string processing. In addition, since 2000, the conference venue has been in Europe in even years. The symposium will be organized by the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow and chaired by Prof. Fabio Crestani. Glasgow is Scotland's largest city and is surrounded by some of the most breathtaking scenery in Western Europe, made famous down the years in verse and song. Today, the city has emerged as the cultural, commercial and convention capital of Scotland. The finest specimen of Victorian architecture in Europe according to the late poet laureate Sir John Betjeman, the city made ships and gigantic locomotives and powerful machines. But most of all, it made friends. The world has been meeting in Glasgow for over a hundred years. In 1888 eleven million visitors attended the International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art. Nine million visitors came to the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 and the Empire Exhibition of 1938 attracted over thirteen million visitors. The tradition has continued with the city hosting the National Garden Festival in 1988, the Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990, the UK City of Architecture and Design 1999 and was European Capital of Sport in 2003. TOPICS: SPIRE 2006 covers research in all aspects of string processing, information retrieval, computational biology, pattern matching, semi-structured data, and related applications. Typical topics of interest include (but are not limited to): String Processing: dictionary algorithms, text searching, pattern matching, text compression, text mining, natural language processing, and automata based string processing. Information Retrieval (IR): IR modelling, indexing, ranking and filtering, interface design, visualization, cross-lingual IR systems, multimedia IR, digital libraries, collaborative retrieval, and Web related applications. Interaction of biology and computation: DNA sequencing and applications in molecular biology, evolution and phylogenetics, recognition of genes and regulatory elements, and sequence driven protein structure prediction. Information Retrieval languages and applications: XML, SGML, information retrieval from semistructured data, text mining, and generation of structured data from text. PROGRAM COMMITTEE CO-CHAIRS: - Paolo Ferragina, Univ. of Pisa, Italy - Mark Sanderson, Univ. of Sheffield, UK CONFERENCE CHAIR: - Fabio Crestani, Univ. of Strathclyde, UK SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS: Details about submission instructions will appear soon on the symposium web site on: http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/spire06/. The proceedings will be published by Springer- Verlag in the LNCS series (pending final approval). IMPORTANT DATES: Paper submission: 14 April, 2006 Authors notification: 2 June, 2006 Camera ready: 23 June, 2006