Text, Speech and Dialogue

The annual Text, Speech and Dialogue Conference (TSD), which originatedin 1998,is now startingits second decade. So far more than 1,000 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 achievementsin the ?eld of natural language processing. It has become aninterdisciplinary forum,interwe- ing the themes of speech technology and language processing. The conference attracts researchers not only from Central and Eastern Europe but also from other parts of the world. Indeed, one ofitsgoals has always been to bring together NLP researchers with differentinterests from different parts of the world and to promote theirmutual co- eration. One of the ambitions of the conferenceis, asits title says, not only to deal with dialogue systems as such, but also to contribute toimproving dialogue between researchersin the two areas of NLP,i. e. , between text and speech people. In ourview, the TSD Conference was successfulinthis respect againin 2010. Thisvolume contains the proceedings of the 13th TSD Conference, heldin Brno, Czech Republicin September 2010.In the review process, 71 papers were accepted out of 144 submitted, an acceptance rate of 49. 3%. We would like to thank all the authors for the efforts they putinto theirsubmissions and the members ofProgram Comm- tee and reviewers who did a wonderfuljob helpingus to select the most appropriate papers. We are alsogratefultotheinvited speakers for their contributions. Theirtalks provideinsightintoimportant currentissues, applications and techniques related to the conference topics.