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                               SIGIR  '95
                                    
                      18th International Conference
                       on Research and Development
                        in Information Retrieval
                                    
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                           PRELIMINARY PROGRAM
                                    
                            Seattle, WA, USA
                        July 9  -  July 13,  1995
                                    
               Sponsored by ACM SIGIR in cooperation with 
                              DD (Denmark)
                          CEPIS-EIRSG (Europe)
                              GI (Germany)
                            AICA-GLIR (Italy)
                              IPSJ (Japan)
                              BCS-IRSG (UK)


                             Sponsorship by
                                    
                                Microsoft
           Graduate School of Library and Information Science,
                        University Libraries, and
                      Computing and Communication,
                        University of Washington
                                    
                       is gratefully acknowledged.

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                               SIGIR  '95
                                    
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SIGIR'95 is an international research conference on
information retrieval theory, systems, practice and
applications.  The annual ACM SIGIR conference, which
alternates between locations in North America and elsewhere,
is the principal international meeting for the presentation of
research and development in information retrieval (IR).  It is
traditionally a venue for the best work in IR and papers are
carefully selected and of high quality.  IR groups within the
computing societies of Denmark, Europe, Germany, Italy, Japan
and the United Kingdom are cooperating sponsors. 

The conference will be valuable to those interested in the
theory of information retrieval as well as those responsible
for system design, testing and evaluation.  Topics include
distributed IR and the Internet, efficiency techniques, text
summarization, natural language processing, fusion strategies,
user studies, search interfaces, and education in IR.
Attendees will learn about the underlying foundations for the
emerging Global Information Infrastructure, which depends upon
searching, browsing, publishing, indexing and other processing
of text and multimedia information collections. 

This year, the 18th in this series, the conference will be
held in Seattle, WA, located in the Pacific Northwest of the
USA.  The city center conference site provides access to
parks, the waterfront, restaurants and shopping, cultural
amenities and sporting events. 

Pre-conference tutorials will cover both beginning and
advanced topics. The main program consists of 40 contributed
papers as well as two panel discussions, poster sessions, and
demonstrations.  The conference will be followed by five
post-conference research workshops on topics of great current
and general interest: visual information retrieval interfaces;
Z39.50; IR and databases; curriculum development for IR; and
automatic construction of hypermedia.