SPIRE 2009 is 16th edition of the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval. The event has been held under this title annually since 1998. The four first events concentrated mainly on string processing (SP) and were held in South America under the title South American Workshop on String Processing (WSP) in 1993, 1995, 1996, and 1997. WSP was transformed into SPIRE in 1998 when the scope of the event was broadened to include also information retrieval (IR). The change was motivated by the increasing relevance of information retrieval and its close inter-relationship with the general area of string processing. From 1999 to 2007, the venue of SPIRE was alternating between South and Latin America (odd years) and Europe (even years). This pattern was broken when SPIRE 2008 was held in Australia.

You may download SPIRE 2009 call for papers in pdf or plain text format.

The scope of the SPIRE series of conferences includes not only fundamental algorithms in SP and IR but also contributions in different application areas such as computational biology, DNA sequencing, WWW based IR systems, and IR related languages like SGML and XML. Given its inter-disciplinary nature, SPIRE offers a singular opportunity for researchers from computer science, information science, and engineering interested in working with problems related to these areas to meet and discuss how to collaborate towards the best solutions.

Typical topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

String Processing: Dictionary algorithms, Text searching, Pattern matching, Text and sequence compression, Automata based string processing.

Information Retrieval: Information retrieval models, Indexing, Ranking and filtering, Interface design, Visualization, Benchmarking.

Natural language processing:Text analysis, Text mining, Machine learning, Information extraction, Language models (both structural and semantic), Knowledge representation.

Search applications and usage: Cross-lingual information access systems, Multimedia information access, Digital libraries, Collaborative retrieval and Web related applications, Semi-structured data retrieval, Evaluation.

Interaction of biology and computation: DNA sequencing and applications in molecular biology, Evolution and phylogenetics, Recognition of genes and regulatory elements, Sequence driven protein structure prediction.

Paper submission deadline: 1 May 2009  (International Date Line West, corresponds to 2 May 2009 12:00 UTC/GMT) passed
Author notification: 5 June 2009 sent
Camera ready paper: 15 June 2009 passed

Yahoo! Research has generously offered to provide funding for some student support packages. Each support package will cover the registration fee for SPIRE 2009 as well as provide partial support for accommodation costs. To be eligible, a student must be enrolled as a full-time student and must also be the primary author and presenter of at least one paper that has been accepted to SPIRE 2009. For more details, please contact the organizers (use the email address on the bottom of the page).

The steering and program committees of SPIRE include numerous internationally known and respected researchers from around the world. Papers submitted to SPIRE 2009 will be evaluated by at least three reviewers using a blind review process. Currently SPIRE 2004 (Padova, Italy) holds the record for the number of papers submitted to SPIRE: 123 papers were received, out of which 25 were accepted as full papers (max 12 pages) and 19 as short papers (max 4 pages). The proceedings of SPIRE have been published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) since 2002. The proceedings of SPIRE 2009 appear as LNCS volume 5721.