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.

"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.