This volume comprises the final versions of the technical papers presented at the UML 2004 conference held in Lisbon (Portugal), October 11–15, 2004. UML 2004 was the seventh conference in a series of annual UML conferences. The series started
By Zhai Chengxiang The purpose of this survey is to systematically and critically review the existing work in applying statistical language models to information retrieval, summarize their contributions, and point out outstanding challenges.