Text, Speech and Dialogue

The annual Text, Speech and Dialogue Conference (TSD), which originated in 1998, is now starting its second decade. So far almost 900 authors from 45 countries have contributed to the proceedings. TSD constitutes a recognizedplatform for the presen- tion and discussion of state-of-the-art technology and recent achievements in the ?eld of natural language processing. It has become an interdisciplinary forum, interweaving the themes of speech technology and language processing. The conference attracts – searchers not only from Central and Eastern Europe, but also from other parts of the world. Indeed, one of its goals has always been to bring together NLP researchers with different interests from different parts of the world and to promote their mutual co- eration. One of the ambitions of the conference is, as its title says, not only to deal with dialogue systems as such, but also to contribute to improving dialogue between researchers in the two areas of NLP, i. e. , between text and speech people. In our view, the TSD conference was successful in this respect in 2008 as well. This volume contains the proceedings of the 11th TSD conference, held in Brno, Czech Republic in September 2008. Following the review process, 79 papers were – ceptedoutof173submitted,anacceptancerateof45. 7%.