Session 1A: Text Retrieval -- Query Expansion with ConceptNet and WordNet: An Intrinsic Comparison -- Document Similarity Search Based on Manifold-Ranking of TextTiles -- Adapting Document Ranking to Users' Preferences Using Click-Through Data -- Session 1B: Search and Extraction -- A PDD-Based Searching Approach for Expert Finding in Intranet Information Management -- A Supervised Learning Approach to Entity Search -- Hierarchical Learning Strategy in Relation Extraction Using Support Vector Machines -- Session 1C: Text Classification and Indexing -- Learning to Separate Text Content and Style for Classification -- Using Relative Entropy for Authorship Attribution -- Efficient Query Evaluation Through Access-Reordering -- Session 1D: Text Clustering -- Natural Document Clustering by Clique Percolation in Random Graphs -- Text Clustering with Limited User Feedback Under Local Metric Learning -- Toward Generic Title Generation for Clustered Documents -- Session 1E: Information Retrieval Models -- Word Sense Language Model for Information Retrieval -- Statistical Behavior Analysis of Smoothing Methods for Language Models of Mandarin Data Sets -- No Tag, a Little Nesting, and Great XML Keyword Search -- Session 2A: Web Information Retrieval -- Improving Re-ranking of Search Results Using Collaborative Filtering -- Learning to Integrate Web Catalogs with Conceptual Relationships in Hierarchical Thesaurus -- Discovering Authoritative News Sources and Top News Stories -- Session 2B: Cross-Language Information Retrieval -- Chinese Question-Answering: Comparing Monolingual with English-Chinese Cross-Lingual Results -- Translation of Unknown Terms Via Web Mining for Information Retrieval -- A Cross-Lingual Framework for Web News Taxonomy Integration -- Session 2C: Question Answering and Summarization.-Learning Question Focus and Semantically Related Features from Web Search Results for Chinese Question Classification -- Improving the Robustness to Recognition Errors in Speech Input Question Answering -- An Adjacency Model for Sentence Ordering in Multi-document Summarization -- Session 2D: Natural Language Processing -- Poor Man's Stemming: Unsupervised Recognition of Same-Stem Words -- NAYOSE: A System for Reference Disambiguation of Proper Nouns Appearing on Web Pages -- Efficient and Robust Phrase Chunking Using Support Vector Machines -- Session 2E: Evaluation -- Statistical and Comparative Evaluation of Various Indexing and Search Models -- Bootstrap-Based Comparisons of IR Metrics for Finding One Relevant Document -- Evaluating Topic Difficulties from the Viewpoint of Query Term Expansion -- Session 3A: Multimedia Information Retrieval -- Incorporating Prior Knowledge into Multi-label Boosting for Cross-Modal Image Annotation and Retrieval -- A Venation-Based Leaf Image Classification Scheme -- Pic-A-Topic: Gathering Information Efficiently from Recorded TV Shows on Travel -- A Music Retrieval System Based on Query-by-Singing for Karaoke Jukebox -- Special Session: Medical Image Retrieval -- A Semantic Fusion Approach Between Medical Images and Reports Using UMLS -- Automated Object Extraction for Medical Image Retrieval Using the Insight Toolkit (ITK) -- Stripe: Image Feature Based on a New Grid Method and Its Application in ImageCLEF -- Poster Session -- An Academic Information Retrieval System Based on Multiagent Framework -- Comparing Web Logs: Sensitivity Analysis and Two Types of Cross-Analysis -- Concept Propagation Based on Visual Similarity -- Query Structuring with Two-Stage Term Dependence in the Japanese Language -- Automatic Expansion of Abbreviations in Chinese NewsText -- A Novel Ant-Based Clustering Approach for Document Clustering -- Evaluating Scalability in Information Retrieval with Multigraded Relevance -- Text Mining for Medical Documents Using a Hidden Markov Model -- Multi-document Summarization Based on Unsupervised Clustering -- A Content-Based 3D Graphic Information Retrieval System -- Query Expansion for Contextual Question Using Genetic Algorithms -- Fine-Grained Named Entity Recognition Using Conditional Random Fields for Question Answering -- A Hybrid Model for Sentence Ordering in Extractive Multi-document Summarization -- Automatic Query Type Identification Based on Click Through Information -- Japanese Question-Answering System for Contextual Questions Using Simple Connection Method, Decreased Adding with Multiple Answers, and Selection by Ratio -- Multi-document Summarization Using a Clustering-Based Hybrid Strategy -- A Web User Preference Perception System Based on Fuzzy Data Mining Method -- An Analysis on Topic Features and Difficulties Based on Web Navigational Retrieval Experiments -- Towards Automatic Domain Classification of Technical Terms: Estimating Domain Specificity of a Term Using the Web -- Evaluating Score Normalization Methods in Data Fusion -- WIDIT: Integrated Approach to HARD Topic Search -- Automatic Query Expansion Using Data Manifold -- An Empirical Comparison of Translation Disambiguation Techniques for Chinese-English Cross-Language Information Retrieval -- Web Mining for Lexical Context-Specific Paraphrasing.

Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS) 2006 was the third AIRS conf- ence in the series established in 2004.The ?rst AIRS washeld in Beijing, China, and the 2nd AIRS was held in Cheju, Korea. The AIRS conference series traces its roots to the successful Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshop series which started in 1996. The AIRS series aims to bring together international researchers and dev- opers to exchange new ideas and the latest results in information retrieval. The scope of the conference encompassed the theory and practice of all aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video, and multimedia data. Wearehappyto reportthatAIRS2006received148submissions,thehighest number since the conference series started in 2004. Submissions came from Asia and Australasia, Europe, and North America. We accepted 34 submissions as regular papers (23%) and 24 as poster papers (16%). We would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers to the conf- ence, the seven area chairs, who worked tirelessly to recruit the program c- mittee members and oversaw the review process, and the program committee members and their secondary reviewers who reviewed all the submissions.