Report on the 3rd Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR-2002)

In the Low Countries, interest in information retrieval, the discipline that is mainly concerned with identifying information in document or multimedia collections, has been modest but steady throughout the years. In 2000, this led to the first Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR) at the University of Maastricht (the Netherlands). Two years later, the third edition of DIR shows that the IR community in Belgium and the Netherlands is more alive than ever. Organized by ICRI/LIIR (the research group Legal Informatics and IR of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and IT, K.U.Leuven, Belgium) in cooperation with SIKS (Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems) and the IWT Flanders, DIR-2002 received considerable attention from researchers and students from the Netherlands, Belgium, and – notwithstanding the local focus – various other countries. Altogether, more than 80 participants registered for the workshop. The local organizers were Marie-Francine Moens (K.U.Leuven, Belgium), Djoerd Hiemstra (University of Twente, the Netherlands) and Wessel Kraaij (TNO Delft, the Netherlands). Unlike DIR-2001, which focussed on user interaction and adaptive methods in IR, the organizers of the 2002 workshop had opted for keeping the subject matter as diverse as possible. Fourteen presentations and a keynote speech were crammed into a tight one-day schedule, covering an array of IR subjects as diverse as XML, video retrieval, cross-language IR, and IR from historical corpora. Candidate speakers were invited to submit an extended abstract, which was checked by an international committee of reviewers. We were very happy that all speakers later also submitted a full paper, although this was by no means a prerequisite for the workshop. All papers and an abstract of the keynote speech are bundled into an electronic volume, which is available at http://www.law.kuleuven.ac.be/icri/proceedings_dir.php.