This research volume presents a sample of recent contributions related to the issue of quality-assessment for Web Based information in the context of information access, retrieval, and filtering systems.

The advent of the Web and the uncontrolled process of documents' generation have raised the problem of declining quality assessment to information on the Web, by considering both the nature of documents (texts, images, video, sounds, and so on), the genre of documents ( news, geographic information, ontologies, medical records, products records, and so on), the reputation of information sources and sites, and, last but not least the actions performed on documents (content indexing, retrieval and ranking, collaborative filtering, and so on).

The volume constitutes a compendium of both heterogeneous approaches and sample applications focusing specific aspects of the quality assessment for Web-based information for researchers, PhD students and practitioners carrying out their research activity in the field of Web information retrieval and filtering, Web information mining, information quality representation and management.

This book presents some recent works on the application of Soft Computing techniques in information access on the World Wide Web. The book comprises 15 chapters from internationally known researchers and is divided in four parts reflecting the areas of research of the presented works such as Document Classification, Semantic Web, Web Information Retrieval and Web Applications. This book demonstrates that Web Information Retrieval is a stimulating area of research where Soft Computing technologies can be applied satisfactorily.

Information retrieval (IR) aims at defining systems able to provide a fast and effective content-based access to a large amount of stored information. The aim of an IR system is to estimate the relevance of documents to users' information needs, expressed by means of a query. This is a very difficult and complex task, since it is pervaded with imprecision and uncertainty. Most of the existing IR systems offer a very simple model of IR, which privileges efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. A promising direction to increase the effectiveness of IR is to model the concept of "partially intrinsic" in the IR process and to make the systems adaptive, i.e. able to "learn" the user's concept of relevance. To this aim, the application of soft computing techniques can be of help to obtain greater flexibility in IR systems.

First of all, I would like to congratulate Gabriella Pasi and Gloria Bordogna for the work they accomplished in preparing this new book in the series "Study in Fuzziness and Soft Computing." "Recent Issues on the Management of Fuzziness in Databases" is undoubtedly a token of their long-lasting and active involvement in the area of Fuzzy Information Retrieval and Fuzzy Database Systems. This book is really welcome in the area of fuzzy databases where they are not numerous although the first works at the crossroads of fuzzy sets and databases were initiated about twenty years ago by L. Zadeh. Only five books have been published since 1995, when the first volume dedicated to fuzzy databases published in the series "Study in Fuzziness and Soft Computing" edited by J. Kacprzyk and myself appeared. Going beyond books strictly speaking, let us also mention the existence of review papers that are part of a couple of handbooks related to fuzzy sets published since 1998. The area known as fuzzy databases covers a bunch of topics among which: -flexible queries addressed to regular databases, -the extension of the notion of a functional dependency, -data mining and fuzzy summarization, -querying databases containing imperfect attribute values represented thanks to possibility distributions.

This research volume presents a sample of recent contributions related to the issue of quality-assessment for Web Based information in the context of information access, retrieval, and filtering systems. The advent of the Web and the uncontrolled process of documents' generation have raised the problem of declining quality assessment to information on the Web, by considering both the nature of documents (texts, images, video, sounds, and so on), the genre of documents ( news, geographic information, ontologies, medical records, products records, and so on), the reputation of information sources and sites, and, last but not least the actions performed on documents (content indexing, retrieval and ranking, collaborative filtering, and so on). The volume constitutes a compendium of both heterogeneous approaches and sample applications focusing specific aspects of the quality assessment for Web-based information for researchers, PhD students and practitioners carrying out their research activity in the field of Web information retrieval and filtering, Web information mining, information quality representation and management.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications, WILF 2013, held in Genoa, Italy, in November 2013. After a rigorous peer-review selection process, ultimately 19 regular papers were selected for inclusion in this volume from 29 submissions. In addition the book contains 3 keynote talks and 2 tutorials. The papers are organized in topical sections named: fuzzy machine learning and interpretability; theory and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Knowledge Discovery, HCI-KDD 2013, held in Maribor, Slovenia, in July 2013, at SouthCHI 2013. The 20 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on human-computer interaction and knowledge discovery, knowledge discovery and smart homes, smart learning environments, and visualization data analytics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Active Media Technology, AMT 2012, held in Macau, China, in December 2012. The 65 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on awareness multi-agent systems, data mining, ontology mining, web reasoning, social applications of active media, human-centered computing, personalization and adaptation, smart digital art and e-learning.

First of all, I would like to congratulate Gabriella Pasi and Gloria Bordogna for the work they accomplished in preparing this new book in the series "Study in Fuzziness and Soft Computing." "Recent Issues on the Management of Fuzziness in Databases" is undoubtedly a token of their long-lasting and active involvement in the area of Fuzzy Information Retrieval and Fuzzy Database Systems. This book is really welcome in the area of fuzzy databases where they are not numerous although the first works at the crossroads of fuzzy sets and databases were initiated about twenty years ago by L. Zadeh. Only five books have been published since 1995, when the first volume dedicated to fuzzy databases published in the series "Study in Fuzziness and Soft Computing" edited by J. Kacprzyk and myself appeared. Going beyond books strictly speaking, let us also mention the existence of review papers that are part of a couple of handbooks related to fuzzy sets published since 1998. The area known as fuzzy databases covers a bunch of topics among which: -flexible queries addressed to regular databases, -the extension of the notion of a functional dependency, -data mining and fuzzy summarization, -querying databases containing imperfect attribute values represented thanks to possibility distributions.

Information retrieval (IR) aims at defining systems able to provide a fast and effective content-based access to a large amount of stored information. The aim of an IR system is to estimate the relevance of documents to users' information needs, expressed by means of a query. This is a very difficult and complex task, since it is pervaded with imprecision and uncertainty. Most of the existing IR systems offer a very simple model of IR, which privileges efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. A promising direction to increase the effectiveness of IR is to model the concept of "partially intrinsic" in the IR process and to make the systems adaptive, i.e. able to "learn" the user's concept of relevance. To this aim, the application of soft computing techniques can be of help to obtain greater flexibility in IR systems.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications held in Camogli, Genoa, Italy in July 2007.

The 84 revised full papers presented together with 3 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from 147 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on fuzzy set theory, fuzzy information access and retrieval, fuzzy machine learning, fuzzy architectures and systems; and special sessions on intuitionistic fuzzy sets and soft computing in image processing. WILF 2007 hosts four special sessions, namely the Fourth International Meeting on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (CIDD 2007), the Third International Workshop on Cross-Language Information Processing (CLIP 2007); Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets: Recent Advances (IFS), and Soft Computing in Image Processing (CLIPS). These special sessions extend and deepen the main topics of WILF.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2006, held in Milan, Italy in June 2006. The book presents 60 revised full papers, organized in topical sections on flexibility in database management and querying, vagueness and uncertainty in XML querying and retrieval, information retrieval and filtering, multimedia information access, user modeling and personalization, knowledge and data extraction, and more.

The papers collected in this book are concerned with the application of the so-called "soft-computing" techniques to the aim of defining flexible systems. The topics covered witness the actual research trend towards an integration of distinct formal techniques for defining flexible systems. The contributions in this volume mainly concern the definition of systems in several application fields, such as image processing, control, asset allocation, medicine, time series forecasting, qualitative modeling, support to design, reliability analysis, diagnosis, filtering, data analysis, land mines detection and so forth. The papers presented in this volume are organized into three main thematic sections: Fuzzy Systems, Neural Networks and Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms, although, as outlined before, some works employ more than one technique from these fields.

Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with the effective and efficient retrieval of information based on its semantic content. The central problem in IR is the quest to find the set of relevant documents, among a large collection containing the information sought, satisfying a user's information need usually expressed in a natural language query. Documents may be objects or items in any medium: text, image, audio, or indeed a mixture of all three. This book presents 12 revised lectures given at the Third European Summer School in Information Retrieval, ESSIR 2000, held at the Villa Monastero, Varenna, Italy, in September 2000. The first part of the book is devoted to the foundation of IR and related areas; the second part on advanced topics addresses various current issues, from usability aspects to Web searching and browsing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2022, held in Bologna, Italy in September 2022.The conference has a clear focus on experimental information retrieval with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search ranging from unstructured to semi structures and structured data. The 7 full papers presented together with 3 short papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 submissions. This year, the contributions addressed the following challenges: authorship attribution, fake news detection and news tracking, noise-detection in automatically transferred relevance judgments, impact of online education on children's conversational search behavior, analysis of multi-modal social media content, knowledge graphs for sensitivity identification, a fusion of deep learning and logic rules for sentiment analysis, medical concept normalization and domain-specific information extraction. In addition to this, the volume presents 7 "best of the labs" papers which were reviewed as full paper submissions with the same review criteria. 14 lab overview papers were accepted and represent scientific challenges based on new datasets and real world problems in multimodal and multilingual information access.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence, MDAI 2019, held in Milan, Italy, in September 2019. The 30 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. They discuss different facets of decision processes in a broad sense and present research in data science, data privacy, aggregation functions, human decision making, graphs and social networks, and recommendation and search. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: aggregation operators and decision making; data science and data mining; and data privacy and security.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management, SUM 2018, which was held in Milan, Italy, in October 2018. The 23 full, 6 short papers and 2 tutorials presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The conference is dedicated to the management of large amounts of complex, uncertain, incomplete, or inconsistent information. New approaches have been developed on imprecise probabilities, fuzzy set theory, rough set theory, ordinal uncertainty representations, or even purely qualitative models.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 40th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2018, held in Grenoble, France, in March 2018. The 39 full papers and 39 short papers presented together with 6 demos, 5 workshops and 3 tutorials, were carefully reviewed and selected from 303 submissions. Accepted papers cover the state of the art in information retrieval including topics such as: topic modeling, deep learning, evaluation, user behavior, document representation, recommendation systems, retrieval methods, learning and classication, and micro-blogs.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Eleventh Flexible Query Answering Systems 2015 (FQAS-2015) held on October 26-28, 2015 in Cracow, Poland. The international conferences on Flexible Query Answering Systems (FQAS) are a series of premier conferences focusing on the key issue in the information society of providing easy, flexible, and intuitive access to information and knowledge to everybody, even people with a very limited computer literacy. In targeting this issue, the Conference draws on several research areas, such as information retrieval, database management, information filtering, knowledge representation, soft computing, management of multimedia information, and human-computer interaction. The Conference provides a unique opportunity for researchers, developers and practitioners to explore new ideas and approaches in a multidisciplinary forum.