Ricardo Baeza-Yates 
Fourth South American Workshop on String Processing (WSP 1997) [PDF ebook] 

We use string processing to denote any use of computers to process and manage strings or sequences of symbols. This includes text retrieval, compression, computational biology, natural language processing, word theory, etc. Strings can also be extended to other dimensions, including images and complex objects, such as trees or graphs. These areas are important for many applications, including text, image or genetic databases. Nowadays, the most important motivation for research is searching and managing the World Wide Web. The Web contains terabytes of data and searching for information is becoming as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack. Future versions of this work-shop will focus on generic information retrieval, query languages, user interfaces and visualization tools.