The symposium focused on advances in techniques in the computer oriented technology of information retrieval. Early developments and the status of recent efforts in document retrieval, question answering and data management systems are briefly reviewed. Unless fundamental processing techniques are developed and made available to workers, information retrieval will continue to flounder and the papers included in this report therefore contain detailed algorithms, procedures, heuristics, evaluative methods or theoretical concepts toward this aim. Session topics include: natural language processing and query systems, natural language in document retrieval systems, theoretical concepts, data management systems, file organization and evaluation, optimizing methods, and a panel discussion of the future of information retrieval. A KWIC index of the titles and authors of papers, and the citations which appear with each paper is provided. (AB)