String Processing and Information Retrieval

The papers contained in this volume were presented at the 12th edition of the International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE), held November 2–4, 2005, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were - lected from 102 papers submitted from 25 countries in response to the Call for Papers.Atotalof27submissionswereacceptedasfullpapers,yieldinganacc- tancerateofabout26%.Inviewofthelargenumberofgood-qualitysubmissions the conference program also included 17 short papers that also appear in the proceedings.In addition, the Steering Committee invited the following speakers: Prabhakar Raghavan (Yahoo! Research, USA), Paolo Ferragina (University of Pisa, Italy), and Gonzalo Navarro (University of Chile, Chile). Papers solicited for SPIRE 2005 were meant to constitute original cont- butions to areas such as string processing (dictionary algorithms, text sear- ing, pattern matching, text compression, text mining, natural language p- cessing, and automata-basedstring processing); information retrieval languages, applications, and evaluation (IR modeling, indexing, ranking and ?ltering, - terface design, visualization, cross-lingual IR systems, multimedia IR, digital libraries,collaborativeretrieval,Web-relatedapplications,XML, information- trievalfromsemi-structureddata,textmining,andgenerationofstructureddata from text); and interaction of biology and computation (sequencing and app- cations in molecular biology, evolution and phylogenetics, recognition of genes and regulatory elements, and sequence-driven protein structure prediction).