A multiple symbol detection (MSD) algorithm is proposed relying on soft information for ultra-wideband systems, where differential space-time block code is employed. The proposed algorithm aims to calculate a posteriori probabilities (APP) of information symbols, where a forward and backward message passing mechanism is implemented based on the BCJR algorithm. Specifically, an MSD metric is analyzed and performed for serving the APP model. Furthermore, an autocorrelation sampling is employed to exploit signals dependencies among different symbols, where the observation window slides one symbol each time. With the aid of the bidirectional message passing mechanism and the proposed sampling approach, the proposed MSD algorithm achieves a better detection performance as compared with the existing MSD. In addition, when the proposed MSD is exploited in conjunction with channel decoding, an iterative soft-input soft-output MSD approach is obtained. Finally, simulations demonstrate that the proposed approaches improve detection performance significantly.