This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, AIRS 2006, held in Singapore in October 2006.

The 34 revised full papers and 24 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 148 submissions. All current issues in information retrieval are addressed: applications, systems, technologies and theoretical aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multi-media data. The papers are organized in topical sections on text retrieval, search and extraction, text classification and indexing, text clustering, information retrieval models, web information retrieval, cross-language information retrieval, question answering and summarization, natural language processing, evaluation, multimedia information retrieval, as well as a special session on medical image retrieval.