SPIRE 2010 is 17th edition of the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval. The event has been held under this title annually since 1998. The four first events concentrated mainly on string processing (SP) and were held in South America under the title South American Workshop on String Processing (WSP) in 1993, 1995, 1996, and 1997. WSP was transformed into SPIRE in 1998 when the scope of the event was broadened to include also information retrieval (IR). The change was motivated by the increasing relevance of information retrieval and its close inter-relationship with the general area of string processing. From 1999 to 2007, the venue of SPIRE was alternating between South and Latin America (odd years) and Europe (even years). This pattern was broken when SPIRE 2008 was held in Australia, but it was probably restarted in 2009 (even) when the venue was Saariselkä, Finland; and now Los Cabos in 2010.

As in the past, the proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Invited speakers:

Mark Najork (Microsoft Research)
**Mining the web graph

Gonzalo Navarro (U. Chile, Chile)
**Compact Data Structures: The Time of IR

Topics
The scope of the SPIRE series of conferences includes not only fundamental algorithms in SP and IR but also contributions in different application areas such as computational biology, DNA sequencing, WWW based IR systems, and IR related languages like SGML and XML. Given its inter-disciplinary nature, SPIRE offers a singular opportunity for researchers from computer science, information science, and engineering interested in working with problems related to these areas to meet and discuss how to collaborate towards the best solutions. Typical topics of interest include, but are not limited to

String Processing: Dictionary algorithms, Text searching, Pattern matching, Text and sequence compression, Automata based string processing.

Information Retrieval: Information retrieval models, Indexing, Ranking and filtering, Interface design, Visualization, Benchmarking.

Natural language processing:Text analysis, Text mining, Machine learning, Information extraction, Language models (both structural and semantic), Knowledge representation.

Search applications and usage: Cross-lingual information access systems, Multimedia information access, Digital libraries, Collaborative retrieval and Web related applications, Semi-structured data retrieval, Evaluation.

Interaction of biology and computation: DNA sequencing and applications in molecular biology, Evolution and phylogenetics, Recognition of genes and regulatory elements, Sequence driven protein structure prediction.

** Efficient implementation of IR systems: Practical implementations with strong experimental support, toolkits for IR systems. Algorithms and data structures for IR.