This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, AIRS 2004, held in Beijing, China, in October 2004.

The 28 revised full papers presented have passed through two rounds of reviewing and improvement and were selected from 106 papers submitted. All current issues in information retrieval are addressed, ranging from algorithmic and methodological issues to application in various fields. Particular emphasis is given to aspects of Asian languages; text retrieval and Web information retrieval are addressed in several papers.