This volumecontainsthe paperspresented atthe 15thString Processingand - formation Retrieval Symposium (SPIRE), held in Melbourne, Australia, during November 10–12, 2008. The papers presented at the symposium were selected from 54 papers s- mitted in response to the Call For Papers. Each submission was reviewed by a minimum of two, and usually three, Program Committee members, who are expertsdrawnfromaroundthe globe. Thecommittee accepted25papers (46%), with the successful authors also covering a broad rangeof continents. The paper “An E?cient Linear Space Algorithm for Consecutive Su?x Alignment Under Edit Distance” by Heikki Hyyr¨ o was selected for the Best Paper Award, while Dina Sokol was awarded the Best Reviewer Award for excellent contributions to the reviewing process. The program also included two invited talks: David Hawking, chief scientist at the Internet and enterprise search company Funn- back Pty. Ltd. based in Australia; and Gad Landau, from the Department of Computer Science at Haifa University, Israel. SPIRE has its origins in the South American Workshop on String Proce- ing which was ?rst held in 1993. Starting in 1998, the focus of the symposium was broadened to include the area of information retrieval due to the c- mon emphasis on information processing. The ?rst 14 meetings were held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (1993); Valparaiso, Chile (1995); Recife, Brazil (1996); Valparaiso, Chile (1997); Santa Cruz, Bolivia (1998); Cancun, Mexico (1999); A Corun ˜a,Spain(2000);LagunaSanRafael,Chile(2001);Lisbon,Portugal(2002); Manaus, Brazil (2003); Padova, Italy (2004); Buenos Aires, Argentina (2005); Glasgow, UK (2006); and Santiago, Chile (2007).