Speech and language technologies continue to grow in importance as they are used to create natural and efficient interfaces between people and machines, and to automatically transcribe, extract, analyze, and route information from high-volume streams of spoken and written information.

The workshops on Mathematical Foundations of Speech Processing and Natural Language Modeling were held in the Fall of 2000 at the University of Minnesota's NSF-sponsored Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, as part of a "Mathematics in Multimedia" year-long program. Each workshop...