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This book contains the collection of papers presented at the Second Workshop on Text, Speech and Dialogue TSD99 held in Plzen and Mari ansk eLazn e (Czech Republic) on 13{17 September 1999. The general objective of the workshop was to present state{of{the{art technology and recent achievements in the eld of natural language processing. A total of 57 papers and 19 posters contributed by 128 authors (63 from Central Europe, 11 from Eastern Europe, 33 from Western Europe, 2 from Africa, 13 from America, and 6 from Asia) were included in the workshop proceedings. The workshop is an interdisciplinary forum, which brings together research in speech and language processing as well as research in the Eastern and Western hemisphere. We feel that the mixture of di erent approaches and applications gives all of us a great opportunity to bene t and learn from each other. We would like to gratefully thank the invited speakers and the authors of the papers for their valuable contributions, the Medav GmbH (Uttenreuth, GER) and the SpeechWorks (Boston, USA) for their nancial support, and Prof. V- tracky for greeting the workshop on behalf of the University of West Bohemia.