SAC 2009

The research context of information access and retrieval aims at modeling, designing and implementing systems able to provide efficient and effective content-based multimodal (possibly ubiquitous) access to a large amount of multimedia (possibly distributed) information.
Information Retrieval (IR) is the first historical research area aimed at defining systems for the automatic access to huge amounts of textual information. Information Retrieval technologies are currently being used in many different application contexts that go far beyond the initial scope of their design. The application of models and techniques proposed and tested in standard experimental contexts to new application areas is a very challenging task that is worth of great attention by the researchers.
Nowadays there is a growing need to access and retrieve relevant distributed information from anywhere and across media, across languages and across modalities. With the expansion of the Internet and of the Web, and the availability of mobile devices other access techniques have been identified and developed, such as Recommender Systems and Information Filtering systems, Question Answering Systems, Meta-search engines, and location based services. The current trends of the research in information access and retrieval include (multimedia) document indexing, (multimedia) document classification and categorization, (multimodal) user interfaces, information visualization, query languages, topic detection and tracking, management of multi-lingual and multimodal information access and retrieval, Geographic Information retrieval etc.

This special track is the eighth edition in the context of SAC and is concerned with the theory, implementation and evaluation of information access and retrieval technologies to novel application areas and novel contexts.
We invite submission of original research contributions, and experimentations in emerging fields such as Geographic Information Retrieval, multimodal Interfaces for information access and presentation.