Welcome to the proceedings of the 8th Workshop of the Initiative for the Eva- ation of XML Retrieval (INEX)! Now in its eighth year, INEX is an established evaluation forum for XML information retrieval (IR), with over 100 organi- tions worldwide registered and over 50 groups participating actively in at least one of the tracks. INEX aims to provide an infrastructure, in the form of a large structured test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of focused retrieval systems. XML IR plays an increasingly important role in many information access systems (e.g., digitallibraries,Web, intranet) where content is a mixture oftext, multimedia, and metadata, formatted according to the adopted W3C standard for information repositories, the so-called eXtensible Markup Language (XML). The ultimate goal of such systems is to provide the right content to their e- users. However, while many of today's information access systems still treat documents as single large (text) blocks, XML o?ers the opportunity to exploit the internal structure of documents in order to allow for more precise access, thus providing more speci?c answers to user requests. Providing e?ective access to XML-based content is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. INEX2009wasanexcitingyearforINEXinwhichanewcollectionwasint- duced that is again based on Wikipedia but is more than four times larger, with longerarticlesandadditionalsemanticannotation.Intotal,eightresearchtracks were included, which studied di?erent aspects of focused information access: Ad Hoc Track investigatedthee?ectivenessofXML-IRandPassageRetrieval for four ad hoc retrievaltasks:Thorough,Focused, Relevant in Context, and Best in Context.

I write with pleasurethis forewordto the proceedings of the 7th workshopof the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX). The increased adoption of XML as the standard for representing a document structure has led to the development of retrieval systems that are aimed at e?ectively accessing XML documents. Providing e?ective access to large collections of XML documents is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. INEX aims to provide the necessary methodological means and worldwide infrastructures for evaluating how good XML retrieval systems are. Since its launch in 2002, INEX has grown both in terms of number of p- ticipants and its coverage of the investigated retrieval tasks and scenarios. In 2002, INEX started with 49 registered participating organizations, whereas this number was more than 100 for 2008. In 2002, there was one main track, c- cerned with the ad hoc retrieval task, whereas in 2008, seven tracks in addition to the main ad hoc track were investigated, looking at various aspects of XML retrieval, from book search to entity ranking, including interaction aspects.

Welcome to the proceedings of the 6th workshop of the Initiative for the Ev- uation of XML Retrieval (INEX) Now in its sixth year, INEX has become an established evaluation forum for XML information retrieval (IR), with over 100 participating organizations worldwide. Its aim is to provide an infrastructure, in the form of a large XML test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of XML IR systems. XMLIRis playinganincreasinglyimportantroleinmanyinformationaccess systems(e.g., digitallibraries, web, intranet)wherecontentisbecomingmoreand more a mixture of text, multimedia, and metadata, formatted according to the adopted W3C standard for information repositories, the so-called eXtensible MarkupLanguage(XML).Theultimategoalofsuchsystemsistoprovidetheright contenttotheirend-users.However, whilemanyoftoday'sinformationaccesss- temsstilltreatdocumentsassinglelarge(text)blocks, XMLo?erstheopportunity toexploittheinternalstructureofdocumentsinordertoallowformoreprecise- cess, thusprovidingmorespeci?canswerstouserrequests.Providinge?ective- cesstoXML-basedcontentisthereforeakeyissueforthesuccessofthesesystems. The aim of the INEX 2007 workshop was to bring together researchers in the ?eld of XML IR who participated in the INEX 2007 campaign. During the past year participating organizations contributed to the building of a large-scale XML test collection by creating topics, performing retrieval runs and providing relevance assessments. The workshop brought together the results of this lar- scale e?ort, summarized and addressed the issues encountered, and devised a work plan for the future evaluation of XML retrieval systems. In total sevenresearchtrackswereincluded in INEX 2007.Thesestudied d- ferentaspectsofXMLinformationaccess: ad-hoc, documentmining, multimedia, heterogeneous, entity ranking, book search, and link-the-wiki. The consolidation of the existing tracks, and the expansion to new areas o?ered by the new tracks has enabled INEX to extend its scope. This volume contains 37 papers selected from 50 submitted ones (74% acceptance rate). Each paper was peer-re

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2006, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2006.

The 49 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for presentation at the workshop and went through a subsequent round of careful reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on methodology, and 7 additional tracks on ad-hoc, natural language processing, heterogeneous collection, multimedia, interactive, use case, as well as document mining.