Information Retrieval (IR):

• IR theory and models
• IR evaluation
• User modeling, personalisation and interactive IR
• Machine learning, categorisation, clustering, and filtering for IR
• Cross-language IR
• Visualisation of search results 
   

Semantic Web Technologies for IR:

• Ontologies
• Reasoning
• Semantic annotation
   

Natural Language Processing for IR:

• Information extraction and summarisation
• Named entity recognition
• Machine translation
• Question answering

Large-scale or distributed computing: 

• Grid computing
• Cloud computing
• GPU and FPGA processing
• Parallel computing
   

Applications of IR:

• Patent processing for intellectual property
• Scientific paper search
• Enterprise search
• Web search