Information Access and Retrieval Track: Editorial message

Information Retrieval Systems and Information Filtering Systems need to cope with the problems posed by the widespread and pervasive diffusion of huge amounts of information of distinct nature and format (videos, images, maps, audio, texts), distinct genre and topics (geographic information, products' and organizations' descriptions, scientific research documentations, news, messages in social networks, etc.), and from etherogenous sources (universities, governamental institutions, private companies, and individuals). Moreover, the importance of taking into account the intentions and aims of both the information's authors and the users searching for information brings toward considering the context in which the search is carried out. The design of effective systems for information access should take into account the multi-dimensional nature of relevance; this can be done by exploiting several indicators and properties, such as topicality, location, trust, reputation, freshness, etc., all contributing to define the relevance of documents to personal information needs. This is a very hard and complex task due to several reasons that a large volume of research has addressed. Nowadays, the research concerned with defining effective systems for information access spans over several hot topics, such as document mining, user modelling, personalized topic detection and tracking, geographic information retrieval and sharing, Web discovery and mining, etc. Information access technologies, and in particular IR, are currently being used in many different application contexts that go far beyond the initial scope of their design. The special Track on Information Access and Retrieval (IAR) was first organized within the ACM International Symposium on Applied Computing in 2002, to the main aim of allowing researchers and practitioners in the IR field to present their experiences in the middle of the theory-practice spectrum of IR and IF, where many successful applications lie. This year the special track is in its fourteen edition in the context of SAC, and it includes 11 full papers (with an acceptance rate of 23%), and four poster papers. Each paper was peer reviewed by at least 3 members of the Program Committee. Our deep gratitude goes to the members of the Program Committee (a list of which can be found in these proceedings): their help has been invaluable for carrying out a high quality selection process. Four papers deal with the problem of groups identification, either to group users or web sites: the papers are entitled "GoSim : A tool for flexible Preference-Driven Group Formation" (by Yves Mouafo, Zoé Faget and Allel Hadjali), "Exploring graph topology via matrix factorization to improve Wikification " (by Raoni Ferreira, Marco Cristo and Maria da Graca Pimentel), "A Sentiment-Based Item Description Approach for kNN Collaborative Filtering " (by Rafael D'Addio and Marcelo Manzato), and "Classifying Websites by Industry Sector: A Study in Feature Design " (by Giacomo Berardi, Andrea Esuli, Tiziano Fagni and Fabrizio Sebastiani). Other four papers deal with problems related with optimizing Web searches, either in terms of efficiency or by personalization, or by context extraction. They are entitled "A Universal Topic Framework (UniZ) and Its Application in Online Search" (by Youngchul Cha, Keng-hao Chang, Hari Bommaganti, Ye Chen, Tak Yan, Bin Bi and Junghoo Cho), "Column-specific Context Extraction for Web Tables" (by Katrin Braunschweig, Maik Thiele, Julian Eberius and Wolfgang Lehner), "Towards a Feature-Rich Data Set for Personalized Access to Long-Tail Content " (by Christin Seifert, Jörg Schlötterer and Michael Granitzer), "BranchGuide: An Indexing Technique for Efficient, Lossless Processing of Branching Path Queri