This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2012, held in Tianjin, China, in December 2012. The 22 full papers and 26 poster presentations included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: IR models; evaluation and user studies; NLP for IR; machine learning and data mining; social media; IR applications; multimedia IT and indexing; collaborative and federated search; and the poster session.

Search for information is no longer exclusively limited within the native language of the user, but is more and more extended to other languages. This gives rise to the problem of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), whose goal is to find relevant information written in a different language to a query. In addition to the problems of monolingual information retrieval (IR), translation is the key problem in CLIR: one should translate either the query or the documents from a language to another. However, this translation problem is not identical to full-text machine translation (MT): the...