Ebook: Text, Speech and Dialogue: 7th International Conference, TSD 2004, Brno, Czech Republic, September 8-11, 2004. Proceedings

This volume contains the Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in September 2004, under the auspices of the Masaryk University. This series of international conferences on text, speech and dialogue has come to c- stitute a major forum for presentation and discussion, not only of the latest developments in academic research in these ?elds, but also of practical and industrial applications. Uniquely, these conferences bring together researchers from a very wide area, both intellectually and geographically, including scientists working in speech technology, dialogue systems, text processing, lexicography, and other related ?elds. In recent years the conference has dev- oped into aprimary meetingplacefor speech and languagetechnologistsfrom manydifferent parts of the world and in particular it has enabled important and fruitful exchanges of ideas between Western and Eastern Europe. TSD 2004 offered a rich program of invited talks, tutorials, technical papers and poster sessions, aswellasworkshops andsystemdemonstrations. Atotalof78paperswereaccepted out of 127 submitted, contributed altogether by 190 authors from 26 countries. Our thanks as usual go to the Program Committee members and to the external reviewers for their conscientious and diligent assessment of submissions, and to the authors themselves for their high-quality contributions. We would also like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to all the members of the Organizing Committee for their tireless efforts in organizing the conference and ensuring its smooth running.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2004, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in September 2004.

The 78 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 128 submissions. The papers present a wealth of state-of-the-art research results in the field of natural language processing with an emphasis on text, speech, and spoken dialogue ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to applications in various fields, such as information retrieval, the semantic Web, algorithmic learning, classification and clustering, speaker recognition and verification, and dialogue management.