theannualconferenceoftheBritishComputerSociety’sspecialistgroupinInf- mation Retrieval. This year the conference was held at the School of Computing and Technology at the University of Sunderland. ECIR began life as the - nual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research. The colloquium was held in the UK each year until 1998 when the event was held in Grenoble, France. Since then the conference venue has alternated between the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, and the event was renamed the European Conference on Information Retrieval. In recent years, ECIR has continued to grow and has become the major European forum for the discussion of research in the ?eld of Information Retrieval. To mark this metamorphosis from a small informal c- loquium to a major event in the IR research calendar, the BCS-IRSG decided to rename the event to the European Conference on Information Retrieval. ECIR2004received88fullpapersubmissions,fromacrossEuropeandfurther a?eldincludingNorthAmerica,ChinaandAustralia,atestamenttothegrowing popularity and reputation of the conference. Out of the 88 submitted papers, 28 were accepted for presentation. All papers were reviewed by at least three reviewers. Among the accepted papers 11 have a student as the primary author, illustrating that the traditional student focus of the original colloquium is alive today.

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