TheAsiaInformationRetrievalSymposium(AIRS)wasestablishedbytheAsian information retrieval community after the successful series of Information - trieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops held in six di?erent locations in Asia, starting from 1996. While the IRAL workshops had their focus on inf- mation retrieval problems involving Asian languages, AIRS covers a wider scope of applications, systems, technologies and theory aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multimedia data. This extension of the scope re?ects and fosters increasing research activities in information retrieval in this region and the growing need for collaborations across subdisciplines. We are very pleased to report that we saw a sharp increase in the number of submissions and their quality, compared to the IRAL workshops. We received 106papersfromninecountriesinAsiaandNorthAmerica,fromwhich28papers (26%) were presented in oral sessions and 38 papers in poster sessions (36%). It was a great challenge for the Program Committee to select the best among the excellent papers. The low acceptance rates witness the success of this year’s conference. After a long discussion between the AIRS 2004 Steering Committee and Springer, the publisher agreed to publish our proceedings in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series, which is SCI-indexed. We feel that this strongly attests to the excellent quality of the papers.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science Commenced Publication in 1973 Founding and Former Series Editors: Gerhard Goos, Juris Hartmanis, and Jan van Leeuwen Editorial Board David Hutchison Lancaster University, UK Takeo Kanade Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Josef Kittler University of Surrey, Guildford, UK Jon M. Kleinberg Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Friedemann Mattern ETH Zurich, Switzerland John C. Mitchell Stanford University, CA, USA Moni Naor Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel Oscar Nierstrasz University of Bern, Switzerland C. Pandu Rangan Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India Bernhard Steffen University of Dortmund, Germany Madhu Sudan Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA Demetri Terzopoulos New York University, NY, USA Doug Tygar University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Moshe Y. Vardi Rice University, Houston, TX, USA Gerhard Weikum Max-Planck Institute of Computer Science, Saarbruecken, Germany 3411 Sung Hyon Myaeng Ming Zhou Kam-Fai Wong Hong-Jiang Zhang (Eds.) Information Retrieval Technology Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, AIRS 2004 Beijing, China, October 18-20, 2004 Revised Selected Papers 13 Volume Editors Sung Hyon Myaeng Information and Communications University (ICU) 119 Munji-Ro, Yuseong-Gu, Daejeon, 305-714, South Korea E-mail:
[email protected] Ming Zhou Hong-Jiang Zhang Microsoft Research Asia 5F, Beijing Sigma Center No. 49 Zhichun Road Haidian District, Beijing 100080, China E-mail: {mingzhou,hjzhang}@microsoft.com Kam-Fai Wong The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong, China E-mail:
[email protected] Library of Congress Control Number: 2005921104 CR Subject Classification (1998): H.3, H.4, F.2.2, E.1, E.2 ISSN 0302-9743 ISBN 3-540-25065-4 Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or