th CICLing 2009 markedthe 10 anniversary of the Annual Conference on Intel- gent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. The CICLing conferences provide a wide-scope forum for the discussion of the art and craft of natural language processing research as well as the best practices in its applications. This volume contains ?ve invited papers and the regular papers accepted for oral presentation at the conference. The papers accepted for poster presentation were published in a special issue of another journal (see the website for more information). Since 2001, the proceedings of CICLing conferences have been published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, as volumes 2004, 2276, 2588, 2945, 3406, 3878, 4394, and 4919. This volume has been structured into 12 sections: - Trends and Opportunities - Linguistic Knowledge Representation Formalisms - Corpus Analysis and Lexical Resources - Extraction of Lexical Knowledge - Morphology and Parsing - Semantics - Word Sense Disambiguation - Machine Translation and Multilinguism - Information Extraction and Text Mining - Information Retrieval and Text Comparison - Text Summarization - Applications to the Humanities A total of 167 papers by 392 authors from 40 countries were submitted for evaluation by the International Program Committee, see Tables 1 and 2. This volume contains revised versions of 44 papers, by 120 authors, selected for oral presentation; the acceptance rate was 26. 3%.

This volume presents the proceedings of the Third International Sanskrit C- putational Linguistics Symposium hosted by the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, IndiaduringJanuary15-17,2009.TheseriesofsymposiaonSanskrit Computational Linguistics began in 2007. The ?rst symposium was hosted by INRIA atRocquencourt, Francein October 2007asa partofthe jointcollabo- tion between INRIA and the University of Hyderabad. This joint collaboration expanded both geographically as well as academically covering more facets of Sanskrit Computaional Linguistics, when the second symposium was hosted by Brown University, USA in May 2008. We received 16 submissions, which were reviewed by the members of the Program Committee. After discussion, nine of them were selected for presen- tion. These nine papers fall under four broad categories: four papers deal with the structure of Pan - ini's Astad - hyay - - ?. Two of them deal with parsing issues, . .. two with various aspects of machine translation, and the last one with the Web concordance of an important Sanskrit text. Ifwelookretrospectivelyoverthelasttwoyears, thethreesymposiainsucc- sion have seen not only continuity of some of the themes, but also steady growth of the community. As is evident, researchers from diverse disciplines such as l- guistics, computer science, philology, and vy- akarana are collaborating with the . scholars from other disciplines, witnessing the growth of Sanskrit computational linguistics as an emergent discipline. We are grateful to S.D. Joshi, Jan Houben, and K.V.R. Krishnamacharyulu for accepting our invitation to deliver the invited speeches."

This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 International Conference on "Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions" held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 15-18, 2008. The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www. cost. esf. org/domains_actions/ict) in the - main of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the research advances developed within COST Action 2102: "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication" http://cost2102. cs. stir. ac. uk. COST 2102 research networking has contributed to modifying the conventional theoretical approach to the cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communi- tion changing the concept of face to face communication with that of body to body communication as well as developing the idea of embodied information. Information is no longer the result of a difference in perception and is no longer measured in terms of quantity of stimuli, since the research developed in COST 2102 has proved that human information processing is a nonlinear process that cannot be seen as the sum of the numerous pieces of information available. Considering simply the pieces of inf- mation available, results in a model of the receiver as a mere decoder, and produces a huge simplification of the communication process.

This volume contains the proceedings of NOLISP 2009, an ISCA Tutorial and Workshop on Non-Linear Speech Processing held at the University of Vic (- talonia, Spain) during June 25-27, 2009. NOLISP2009wasprecededbythreeeditionsofthisbiannualeventheld2003 in Le Croisic (France), 2005 in Barcelona, and 2007 in Paris. The main idea of NOLISP workshops is to present and discuss new ideas, techniques and results related to alternative approaches in speech processing that may depart from the mainstream. In order to work at the front-end of the subject area, the following domains of interest have been de?ned for NOLISP 2009: 1. Non-linear approximation and estimation 2. Non-linear oscillators and predictors 3. Higher-order statistics 4. Independent component analysis 5. Nearest neighbors 6. Neural networks 7. Decision trees 8. Non-parametric models 9. Dynamics for non-linear systems 10. Fractal methods 11. Chaos modeling 12. Non-linear di?erential equations The initiative to organize NOLISP 2009 at the University of Vic (UVic) came from the UVic Research Group on Signal Processing and was supported by the Hardware-Software Research Group. We would like to acknowledge the ?nancial support obtained from the M- istry of Science and Innovation of Spain (MICINN), University of Vic, ISCA, and EURASIP. All contributions to this volume are original. They were subject to a doub- blind refereeing procedure before their acceptance for the workshop and were revised after being presented at NOLISP 2009.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, GoTAL 2008, Gothenburg, Sweden, August 2008.

The 44 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 107 submissions. The papers address all current issues in computational linguistics and monolingual and multilingual intelligent language processing - theory, methods and applications.

This Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) volume contains the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Computational Forensics (IWCF 2008), held August 7-8, 2008. It was a great honor for the organizers to host this scienti?c event at the renowned National Academy of Sciences: Keck Center in Washington, DC, USA. Computational Forensics is an emerging research domain focusing on the investigation of forensic problems using computational methods. Its primary goalis the discoveryand advancement of forensicknowledgeinvolving modeling, computer simulation, and computer-based analysis and recognition in studying and solving forensic problems. The Computational Forensics workshop series is intended as a forum for researchers and practitioners in all areas of computational and forensic sciences. This forum discusses current challenges in computer-assisted forensic investi- tions and presents recent progress and advances. IWCF addresses a broad spectrum of forensic disciplines that use computer tools for criminal investigation. This year's edition covers presentations on c- putational methods for individuality studies, computer-based3D processing and analysis of skulls and human bodies, shoe print preprocessing and analysis, n- ural language analysis and information retrieval to support law enforcement, analysis and group visualization of speech recordings, scanner and print device forensics, and computer-based questioned document and signature analysis.

For many years Leonard Bolc has played an important role in the Polish computer science community. He is especially known for his clear vision in the development of artificial intelligence, inspiring research, organizational and editorial achievements in areas such as e.g.: logic, automatic reasoning, natural language processing, and computer applications of natural language or human-like reasoning.

This Festschrift volume, published to honor Leonard Bolc on his 75th birthday includes 17 refereed papers by leading researchers, his friends, former students and colleagues to celebrate his scientific career. The essays present research in the areas which Leonard Bolc and his colleagues investigated during his long scientific career.

The volume is organized in three parts; the first is devoted to logic - the domain which was one of the most explored by Leonard Bolc himself. The second part contains papers focusing on different aspects of computational linguistics; the third part comprises papers describing different applications in which natural language processing or automatic reasoning plays an important role.

This volume contains the full and short papers of SAMT 2009, the 4th Int- national Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies 2009 held in Graz, Austria. SAMT brings together researchers dealing with a broad range of research topics related to semantic multimedia and a great diversity of application - eas. The current research shows that adding and using semantics of multimedia content is broadening its scope from search and retrieval to the complete media life cycle, from content creation to distribution and consumption, thus lever- ing new possibilities in creating, sharing and reusing multimedia content. While some of the contributions present improvements in automatic analysis and - notation methods, there is increasingly more work dealing with visualization, user interaction and collaboration. We can also observe ongoing standardization activities related to semantic multimedia in both W3C and MPEG, forming a solid basis for a wide adoption. Theconferencereceived41submissionsthisyear, ofwhichtheProgramC- mittee selected 13 full papers for oral presentation and 8 short papers for poster presentation. In addition to the scienti?c papers, the conference program - cluded two invited talks by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Stefan Rug ] er and a demo session showing results from three European projects. The day before the main conference o?ered an industry day with presen- tions and demos that showed the growing importance of semantic technologies in real-world applications as well as the research challenges coming from them."

Half a centuryago not manypeople had realizedthat a new epoch in the history of homo sapiens had just started. The term "Information Society Age" seems an appropriate name for this epoch. Communication was without a doubt a lever of the conquest of the human race over the rest of the animate world. There is little doubt that the human racebegan when our predecessorsstarted to communicate with each other using language.This highly abstractmeans of communicationwas probably one of the major factors contributing to the evolutionary success of the human race within the animal world. Physically weak and imperfect, humans started to dominate the rest of the world through the creation of communication-based societies where individuals communicated initially to satisfy immediate needs, and then to create, accumulate and process knowledge for future use. The crucial step in the history of humanity was the invention of writing. It is worth noting that writing is a human invention, not a phenomenon resulting from natural evolution. Humans invented writing as a technique for recording speech as well as for storing and facilitating the dissemination of knowledge across the world. Humans continue to be born illiterate, and therefore teaching and conscious supervised learning is necessary to maintain this basic social skill.

We are pleased to present this LNCS volume, the Proceedings of the 22nd A- tralasianJointConferenceonArti?cialIntelligence(AI2009), heldinMelbourne, Australia, December 1-4,2009.This long established annual regionalconference is a forum both for the presentation of researchadvances in arti?cial intelligence and for scienti?c interchange amongst researchers and practitioners in the ?eld of arti?cial intelligence. Conference attendees were also able to enjoy AI 2009 being co-located with the Australasian Data Mining Conference (AusDM 2009) and the 4th Australian Conference on Arti?cial Life (ACAL 2009). This year AI 2009 received 174 submissions, from authors of 30 di?erent countries. After an extensive peer review process where each submitted paper was rigorously reviewed by at least 2 (and in most cases 3) independent revi- ers, the best 68 papers were selected by the senior Program Committee for oral presentation at the conference and included in this volume, resulting in an - ceptance rate of 39%. The papers included in this volume cover a wide range of topics in arti?cial intelligence: from machine learning to natural language s- tems, from knowledge representation to soft computing, from theoretical issues to real-world applications. AI 2009 also included 11 tutorials, available through the First Australian Computational Intelligence Summer School (ACISS 2009). These tutorials - some introductory, some advanced - covered a wide range of research topics within arti?cial intelligence, including data mining, games, evolutionary c- putation, swarm optimization, intelligent agents, Bayesian and belief networks

From the point of view of computational linguistics, morphological resources are the basis for all higher-level applications. This is especially true for languages with a rich morphology, such as German or Finnish. A morphology component should thus be capable of analyzing single word forms as well as whole corpora. For many practical applications, not only morphological analysis, but also generation is required, i.e., the production of surfaces corresponding to speci?c categories. Apart from uses in computational linguistics, there are also numerous practical - plications that either require morphological analysis and generation or that can greatly bene?t from it, for example, in text processing, user interfaces, or information - trieval. These applications have speci?c requirements for morphological components, including requirements from software engineering, such as programming interfaces or robustness. In 1994, the First Morpholympics took place at the University of Erlangen- Nuremberg, a competition between several systems for the analysis and generation of German word forms. Eight systems participated in the First Morpholympics; the conference proceedings [1] thus give a very good overview of the state of the art in computational morphologyfor German as of 1994.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canadian AI 2009, held in Kelowna, Canada, in May 2009.

The 15 revised full papers presented together with 19 revised short papers, 8 papers from the graduate student symposium and the abstracts of 3 keynote presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers present original high-quality research in all areas of Artificial Intelligence and apply historical AI techniques to modern problem domains as well as recent techniques to historical problem settings.

This volume collects the papers selected for presentation at the Third Inter- tional Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research (MTSR 2009), held in Milan at the University of Milano-Bicocca (October 1-2, 2009). Metadataandsemanticresearchistodayagrowingcomplexsetofconceptual, theoretical, methodological, and technological frameworks, o?ering innovative computational solutions in the design and development of computer-based s- tems.Fromthis perspective,researchersworkinginthisareamusttackleabroad range of issues on methods, results, and solutions coming from di?erent classic areas of this discipline. The conference has been designed as a forum allowing researchers to present and discuss specialized results as general contributions to the ?eld. In order to give a novelperspective in which both theoreticaland application aspects of metadata research contribute in the growth of the area, this book mirrors the structure of the conference, grouping the papers into three main categories: (1) Theoretical Research: Results and Proposals; (2) Applications: Case Studies and Proposals; (3) Special Track: Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture,FoodandEnvironment.Thebookcontains31fullpapers(10forthe ? rstcategory,10forthesecondand12forthethird),selectedfromapreliminary initial set of about 70 submissions. Many people contributed to the success of the conference and the creation of this volume, from the initial idea to its implementation. Our ?rst ackno- edgement is to the members of the Steering Commitee, GeorgeBokosand David Raitt. We would also like to thank all Program Committee members and - viewers for their collaboration. Special thanks to Carlo Batini, on behalf of the DepartmentofComputerScience,SystemsandCommunicationoftheUniversity of Milan-Bicocca, who kindly hosted our conference.

WearepleasedtowelcomeyoutotheproceedingsoftheThirdInternationalC- ference onSemantic andDigital Media Technologiesheld inKoblenz, Germany. The SAMT agenda brings together researchers at extreme ends of the - mantic multimedia spectrum. At one end, the Semantic Web and its supporting technologies are becoming established in both the open data environment and within specialist domains, such as corporate intranet search, e-Science (parti- larly life sciences), and cultural heritage. To facilitate the world-wide sharing of media, W3C is developing standard ways of denoting fragments of audio/visual content and of specifying and associating semantics with these. At the other end of the spectrum, media analysis tools continue to grow in sophistication, identifying features that can then be associated with explicit semantics, be they expressed formally or informally, using proprietary formats or open standards. Recent progress at these two fronts of the SAMT spectrum means that research spanningthesemanticgapisnowofvitalimportancetofeedtherealapplications that are emerging. This conference also represents a step towards bridging the gap between the research cultures and their respective approaches at both ends of the spectrum. The papers selected show that SAMT is able to attract researchers from media analysis, who see the bene?ts that more explicit semantics can provide, as well as researchers from knowledge engineering who realize that, while a picture can be expressed as a thousand concepts, a million morearewaiting to be extracted

Since 1993 the conference Developments in Language Theory (DLT) has been held in Europe every odd year and, since 2002, outside Europe every even year. The 13th conference in this series was DLT 2009. It took place in Stuttgart fromJune30to July3.PreviousmeetingsoccurredinTurku(1993), Magdeburg (1995), Thessaloniki(1997), Aachen(1999), Vienna(2001), Kyoto(2002), Szeged (2003), Auckland (2004), Palermo (2005), Santa Barbara (2006), Turku (2007), and Kyoto (2008). The DLT conference has developed into the main forum for language theory and related topics. This has also been re?ected in the high quality of the 70 s- missions received in 2009. Most submissions were reviewed by four Programme Committeemembersandtheirsub-referees.TheProgrammeCommitteeselected the best 35 papers for presentation during the conference. These 35 papers are also published in this proceedings volume. Members of the ProgrammeComm- tee were not allowed to submit papers. The work of the Programme Committee wasorganizedusingtheEasyChairconferencesystem, thankstoAndreiVoronkov. The conference programme included ?ve invited lectures. They were given by Mikola j Bojanczyk (Warsaw), Paul Gastin (Cachan), Tero Harju (Turku), ChristosKapoutsis(Nicosia), andBenjaminSteinberg(Ottawa).Wearegrateful to the invited speakers for accepting the invitation and presenting their lectures and for their contributions to the proceedings. The Informatik Forum Stuttgart provided a best paper award, which was selected by the Programme Committee. The recipient was: "Magic Numbers and Ternary Alphabet" by Galina Jiraskova."

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the 4th volume of the FoLLI LNAI subline; containing the refereed proceedings of the 16h International Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation, WoLLIC 2009, held in Tokyo, Japan, in June 2009.

The 25 revised full papers presented together with six tutorials and invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The papers cover some of the most active areas of research on the frontiers between computation, logic, and linguistics, with particular interest in cross-disciplinary topics. Typical areas of interest are: foundations of computing and programming; novel computation models and paradigms; broad notions of proof and belief; formal methods in software and hardware development; logical approach to natural language and reasoning; logics of programs, actions and resources; foundational aspects of information organization, search, flow, sharing, and protection.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, IbPRIA 2009, held in Povoa de Varzim, Portugal in June 2009.

The 33 revised full papers and 29 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computer vision, image analysis and processing, as well as pattern recognition.

Empirical translation studies is a rapidly evolving research area. This volume, written by world-leading researchers, demonstrates the integration of two new research paradigms: socially-oriented and data driven approaches to empirical translation studies. These two models expand current translation studies and stimulate reader debates around how development of quantitative research methods and integration with advances in translation technologies would significantly increase the research capacities of translation studies. Highly engaging, the volume pioneers the development of socially-oriented innovative research methods to enhance the current research capacities of theoretical (descriptive) translation studies in order to tackle real-life research issues, such as environmental protection and multicultural health promotion. Illustrative case studies are used, bringing insight into advanced research methodologies of designing, developing and analysing large scale digital databases for multilingual and/or translation research.

This book discusses the connection between two areas of semantics, namely the semantics of databases and the semantics of natural language, and links them via a common view of the semantics of time. It is argued that a coherent theory of the semantics of time is an essential ingredient for the success of efforts to incorporate more 'real world' semantics into database models. This idea is a relatively recent concern of database research but it is receiving growing interest. The book begins with a discussion of database querying which motivates the use of the paradigm of Montague Semantics and discusses the details of the intensional logic ILs. This is followed by a description of the author's own model, the Historical Relational Data Model (HRDM) which extends the RDM to include a temporal dimension. Finally the database querying language QEHIII is defined and examples illustrate its use. A formal model for the interpretation of questions is presented in this work which will form the basis for much further research.

Work practices and organizational processes vary widely and evolve constantly. The technological infrastructure has to follow, allowing or even supporting these changes. Traditional approaches to software engineering reach their limits whenever the full spectrum of user requirements cannot be anticipated or the frequency of changes makes software reengineering cycles too clumsy to address all the needs of a specific field of application. Moreover, the increasing importance of 'infrastructural' aspects, particularly the mutual dependencies between technologies, usages, and domain competencies, calls for a differentiation of roles beyond the classical user-designer dichotomy. End user development (EUD) addresses these issues by offering lightweight, use-time support which allows users to configure, adapt, and evolve their software by themselves. EUD is understood as a set of methods, techniques, and tools that allow users of software systems who are acting as non-professional software developers to 1 create, modify, or extend a software artifact. While programming activities by non-professional actors are an essential focus, EUD also investigates related activities such as collective understanding and sense-making of use problems and solutions, the interaction among end users with regard to the introduction and diffusion of new configurations, or delegation patterns that may also partly involve professional designers.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2007, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 2007.

The 22 revised full papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous presentations given at the symposium. The focus of the papers is on the following topics: conceptual modeling of spatial relations, pragmatics and game theory, atypical valency phenomena, lexical typology, formal semantics and experimental evidence, exceptional quantifier scope, Georgian focussing particles, polarity and pragmatics, dynamics of belief, learning theory, inquisitive semantics, modal logic, coalgebras, computational linguistics of Georgian, type-logical grammar and cross-serial dependencies, non-monotonic logic, Japanese quantifiers, intuitionistic logic, semantics of negated nominals, word sense disambiguation, semantics of question-embedding predicates, and reciprocals and computational complexity.

The International Conference on the Computer Processing of Oriental L- guages(ICCPOL)seriesishostedbytheChineseandOrientalLanguagesSociety (COLCS),aninternationalsocietyfoundedin1975.RecentICCPOLeventshave been held in Hong Kong (1997), Tokushima, Japan (1999), Seoul, Korea (2001), Shenyang, China (2003) and Singapore (2006). This volume presents the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference ontheComputerProcessingofOrientalLanguages(ICCPOL2009)heldinHong Kong, March 26-27, 2009. We received 63 submissions and all the papers went through a blind review process by members of the Program Committee. After careful discussion, 25 of them were selected for oral presentation and 15 for poster presentation. The accepted papers covered a variety of topics in natural language processing and its applications, including word segmentation, phrase and term extraction, chunking and parsing, semantic labelling, opinion mining, ontology construction, machine translation, information extraction, document summarization and so on. On behalf of the Program Committee, we would like to thank all authors of submitted papers for their support. We wish to extend our appreciation to the Program Committee members and additional external reviewers for their tremendous e?ort and excellent reviews. We gratefully acknowledge the Or- nizing Committee and Publication Committee members for their generous c- tribution to the success of the conference. We also thank the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, the Department of Systems - gineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and the Centre for Language Technology, Macquarie University, Australia for their valuable support.

Automated Speaking Assessment: Using Language Technologies to Score Spontaneous Speech provides a thorough overview of state-of-the-art automated speech scoring technology as it is currently used at Educational Testing Service (ETS). Its main focus is related to the automated scoring of spontaneous speech elicited by TOEFL iBT Speaking section items, but other applications of speech scoring, such as for more predictable spoken responses or responses provided in a dialogic setting, are also discussed. The book begins with an in-depth overview of the nascent field of automated speech scoring-its history, applications, and challenges-followed by a discussion of psychometric considerations for automated speech scoring. The second and third parts discuss the integral main components of an automated speech scoring system as well as the different types of automatically generated measures extracted by the system features related to evaluate the speaking construct of communicative competence as measured defined by the TOEFL iBT Speaking assessment. Finally, the last part of the book touches on more recent developments, such as providing more detailed feedback on test takers' spoken responses using speech features and scoring of dialogic speech. It concludes with a discussion, summary, and outlook on future developments in this area. Written with minimal technical details for the benefit of non-experts, this book is an ideal resource for graduate students in courses on Language Testing and Assessment as well as teachers and researchers in applied linguistics.

IBERAMIA is the international conference series of the Ibero-American Art- cialIntelligencecommunitythathasbeenmeetingeverytwoyearssincethe1988 meeting in Barcelona. The conference is supported by the main Ibero-American societies of AI and provides researchers from Portugal, Spain, and Latin Am- ica the opportunity to meet with AI researchers from all over the world. Since 1998, IBERAMIA has been a widely recognized international conference, with its papers written and presented in English, and its proceedings published by Springer in the LNAI series. This volume contains the papers accepted for presentation at Iberamia 2008, held in Lisbon, Portugal in October 2008. For this conference, 147 papers were submitted for the main track, and 46 papers were accepted. Each submitted paper was reviewed by three members of the Program Committee (PC), coor- nated by an Area Chair. In certain cases, extra reviewerswererecruited to write additional reviews. The list of Area Chairs, PC members, and reviewers can be found on the pages that follow. The authors of the submitted papers represent 14 countries with topics c- ering the whole spectrum of themes in AI: robotics and multiagent systems, knowledge representation and constraints, machine learning and planning, n- ural language processing and AI applications. TheprogramforIberamia2008alsoincludedthreeinvitedspeakers:Christian Lemaitre (LANIA, M exico), R. Michael Young (NCSU, USA) and Miguel Dias (Microsoft LDMC, Lisbon) as well as ?ve workshops.

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%.