Report on ACM SIGIR workshop on mathematical/formal methods in information retrieval

The previous two MF/IR workshops (ACM SIGIR 2000 MF/IR 2000, Athens, Greece, and ACM SIGIR 2001 MF/IR 2001, New Orleans, USA) showed that the mathematical/formal results achieved in Information Retrieval (IR) could be organized into a coherent theoretical framework, that they brought new knowledge to IR, and that mathematical/formal research in IR can stand as a specialized research area of IR. Therefore the purpose of the MF/IR 2002, which was the third in row, workshop was, on the one hand, to continue and enhance the results obtained so far, and on the other hand, to present, discuss, analyze, integrate the newer/newest results. MF/IR 2002 also aimed at promoting discussion and interaction among those with theoretical and applicative research interests in mathematical/formal aspects of Information Retrieval, and also at being a forum for the presentation of both theoretical and applicative results (e.g., foundational issues; description and/or integration of models; retrieval applications; mathematical/formal techniques, properties and structures in IR; existing and/or new theories and theoretical aspects).The following areas were addressed: Information Retrieval, Information Filtering, Information, Mining, Indexing and Retrieval, Hypermedia, World Wide Web Retrieval, Digital Libraries, Evaluation, Human Computer Interaction, User Modeling, Semantic Web and Ontologies, where the different entities involved (e.g., documents, queries, indexing, retrieval, relevance, effectiveness, users, etc.) were modeled using any of, but not necessarily limited to, the following approaches: Classical Sets, Fuzzy Sets, Rough Sets, Vectors, Linear Space, Similarity Functions, Probability, Theory of Uncertainty, Functional Analysis, Algebra, Topology, Metric Spaces, Euclidean Geometry, Non-Euclidean Geometries, Boolean Logic, Non-standard Logics, Fuzzy Logic, Quantum Logic, Matroid Theory, Graph Theory.