"Search Is a Solved Problem" and Other Annoying Fallacies.- Approximate Runs - Revisited.- Engineering Radix Sort for Strings.- Faster Text Fingerprinting.- Context-Sensitive Grammar Transform: Compression and Pattern Matching.- Improved Variable-to-Fixed Length Codes.- Term Impacts as Normalized Term Frequencies for BM25 Similarity Scoring.- The Effect of Weighted Term Frequencies on Probabilistic Latent Semantic Term Relationships.- Comparison of s-gram Proximity Measures in Out-of-Vocabulary Word Translation.- Speeding Up Pattern Matching by Text Sampling.- Mismatch Sampling.- Sliding CDAWG Perfection.- Self-indexing Natural Language.- New Perspectives on the Prefix Array.- Indexed Hierarchical Approximate String Matching.- An Efficient Linear Space Algorithm for Consecutive Suffix Alignment under Edit Distance (Short Preliminary Paper).- Run-Length Compressed Indexes Are Superior for Highly Repetitive Sequence Collections.- Practical Rank/Select Queries over Arbitrary Sequences.- Clique Analysis of Query Log Graphs.- Out of the Box Phrase Indexing.- Approximated Pattern Matching with the L 1, L 2 and L ??? Metrics.- Interchange Rearrangement: The Element-Cost Model.- ?? - Parameterized Matching.- Pattern Matching with Pair Correlation Distance.- Some Approximations for Shortest Common Nonsubsequences and Supersequences.- On the Structure of Small Motif Recognition Instances.- Exact Distribution of a Spaced Seed Statistic for DNA Homology Detection.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, SPIRE 2008, held in Melbourne, Australia, in November 2008. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on compression and performance, information retrieval scoring and ranking, string matching techniques, self-indexing, string matching: space and practicality, information retrieval, non-standard matching, and bioinformatics.