Most of the papers in this volume were first presented at the Workshop on Cross-Linguistic Information Retrieval that was held August 22, 1996 dur­ ing the SIGIR'96 Conference. Alan Smeaton of Dublin University and Paraic Sheridan of the ETH, Zurich, were the two other members of the Scientific Committee for this workshop. SIGIR is the Association for Computing Ma­ chinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, and they have held conferences yearly since 1977. Three additional papers have been added: Chapter 4 Distributed Cross-Lingual Information retrieval describes the EMIR retrieval system, one of the first general cross-language systems to be implemented and evaluated; Chapter 6 Mapping Vocabularies Using Latent Semantic Indexing, which originally appeared as a technical report in the Lab­ oratory for Computational Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, is included here because it was one of the earliest, though hard-to-find, publi­ cations showing the application of Latent Semantic Indexing to the problem of cross-language retrieval; and Chapter 10 A Weighted Boolean Model for Cross­ Language Text Retrieval describes a recent approach to solving the translation term weighting problem, specific to Cross-Language Information Retrieval. Gregory Grefenstette CONTRIBUTORS Lisa Ballesteros David Hull W, Bruce Croft Gregory Grefenstette Center for Intelligent Xerox Research Centre Europe Information Retrieval Grenoble Laboratory Computer Science Department University of Massachusetts Thomas K. Landauer Department of Psychology Mark W. Davis and Institute of Cognitive Science Computing Research Lab University of Colorado, Boulder New Mexico State University Michael L. Littman Bonnie J.