Theseproceedingscontaintherefereedfulltechnicalpaperspresentedatthe26th Annual European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2004). ECIR is theannualconferenceoftheBritishComputerSociety'sspecialistgroupinInf- mation Retrieval. This year the conference was held at the School of Computing and Technology at the University of Sunderland. ECIR began life as the - nual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research. The colloquium was held in the UK each year until 1998 when the event was held in Grenoble, France. Since then the conference venue has alternated between the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, and the event was renamed the European Conference on Information Retrieval. In recent years, ECIR has continued to grow and has become the major European forum for the discussion of research in the ?eld of Information Retrieval. To mark this metamorphosis from a small informal c- loquium to a major event in the IR research calendar, the BCS-IRSG decided to rename the event to the European Conference on Information Retrieval. ECIR2004received88fullpapersubmissions,fromacrossEuropeandfurther a?eldincludingNorthAmerica,ChinaandAustralia,atestamenttothegrowing popularity and reputation of the conference. Out of the 88 submitted papers, 28 were accepted for presentation. All papers were reviewed by at least three reviewers. Among the accepted papers 11 have a student as the primary author, illustrating that the traditional student focus of the original colloquium is alive today.

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Keynote Papers.- From Information Retrieval to Information Interaction.- IR and AI: Traditions of Representation and Anti-representation in Information Processing.- User Studies.- A User-Centered Approach to Evaluating Topic Models.- A Study of User Interaction with a Concept-Based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool.- Searcher's Assessments of Task Complexity for Web Searching.- Question Answering.- Evaluating Passage Retrieval Approaches for Question Answering.- Identification of Relevant and Novel Sentences Using Reference Corpus.- Answer Selection in a Multi-stream Open Domain Question Answering System.- Information Models.- A Bidimensional View of Documents for Text Categorisation.- Query Difficulty, Robustness, and Selective Application of Query Expansion.- Combining CORI and the Decision-Theoretic Approach for Advanced Resource Selection.- Predictive Top-Down Knowledge Improves Neural Exploratory Bottom-Up Clustering.- Classification.- Contextual Document Clustering.- Complex Linguistic Features for Text Classification: A Comprehensive Study.- Eliminating High-Degree Biased Character Bigrams for Dimensionality Reduction in Chinese Text Categorization.- Summarization.- Broadcast News Gisting Using Lexical Cohesion Analysis.- From Text Summarisation to Style-Specific Summarisation for Broadcast News.- Image Retrieval.- Relevance Feedback for Cross Language Image Retrieval.- NN k Networks for Content-Based Image Retrieval.- Integrating Perceptual Signal Features within a Multi-facetted Conceptual Model for Automatic Image Retrieval.- Evaluation Issues.- Improving Retrieval Effectiveness by Reranking Documents Based on Controlled Vocabulary.- A Study of the Assessment of Relevance for the INEX'02 Test Collection.- A Simulated Study of Implicit Feedback Models.- Cross Language IR.- Cross-Language Information Retrieval Using EuroWordNet and Word Sense Disambiguation.- Fault-Tolerant Fulltext Information Retrieval in Digital Multilingual Encyclopedias with Weighted Pattern Morphing.- Measuring a Cross Language Image Retrieval System.- Web-Based and XML IR.- An Optimistic Model for Searching Web Directories.- Content-Aware DataGuides: Interleaving IR and DB Indexing Techniques for Efficient Retrieval of Textual XML Data.- Performance Analysis of Distributed Architectures to Index One Terabyte of Text.- Applying the Divergence from Randomness Approach for Content-Only Search in XML Documents.