Editorial message: special track on information access and retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) aims at modelling, designing and implementing systems able to provide fast and effective content-based access to a large amount of information. Information can be of any kind: textual, visual, or auditory. The aim of such systems is to estimate the relevance of documents to a user information need. This is a very hard and complex task for many different reasons that a large volume of research has attempted to explain and tackle. Nowadays, research in information retrieval is central to the design and development of advanced information access technologies and spans a number of research topics including document modelling, document classification and categorization, system architecture, user interfaces, data visualisation, languages, topic detection, etc.