th TSD 2009was the 12 eventin the series of InternationalConferenceson Text Speech
andDialoguesupportedbytheInternationalSpeechCommunicationAssociation(ISCA) ? and Czech Society
for Cybernetics and Informatics (CSKI). This year TSD was held in Plzen ? (Pilsen) in the
Primavera Conference Center during September 13 17 2009 and it was organized by the
University of West Bohemia in Plzen ? in cooperation with Masaryk University of Brno Czech
Republic. Like its predecessors TSD 2009 hi- lighted to both the academic and scienti?c world
the importance of text and speech processing and its most recent breakthroughsin current
applications. Both experienced researchers and professionals as well as newcomers to the text
and speech processing ?eld interested in designing or evaluating interactive software
developing new int- action technologies or investigatingoverarchingtheories of text and speech
processing found in the TSD conference a forum to communicate with people sharing similar -
terests. The conference is an interdisciplinary forum intertwining research in speech and
language processing with its applications in everyday practice. We feel that the mixture of
different approaches and applications offered a great opportunity to get - quaintedwith
currentactivitiesin all aspects oflanguagecommunicationand to witness the amazing vitality of
researchers from developing countries too. This year s conference was partially oriented toward
semantic processing which was chosen as the main topic of the conference. All invited speakers
(Frederick Jelinek Louise Guthrie Roberto Pieraccini Tilman Becker and Elmar Not h) gave
lectures on thenewestresultsintherelativelybroadandstillunexploredareaofsemanticprocessing.
