Special issue on soft computing applications to intelligent information retrieval on the Internet

This special issue encompasses eleven papers devoted to the recent developments in the applications of soft computing (SC) techniques to information retrieval (IR), both in the text and Web retrieval areas. The seed of the current issue were some of the presentations made in two special sessions organized by the guest editors in two different conferences: the First Spanish Conference on Evolutionary and Bioinspired Algorithms (AEB’02), that was held in M erida, Spain, February 2002, and the Seventh International ISKO Conference (ISKO’02), held in Granada, Spain, July 2002. The scope of both special sessions was pretty related. In the former conference, the session topic was ‘‘Applications of Evolutionary Computation to Information Retrieval’’ while in the latter the session was entitled ‘‘Artificial Intelligence Applications to Information Retrieval’’