This book presents revised versions of the lectures given at the 8th ELSNET European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication held on the Island of Chios, Greece, in summer 2000.

Besides an introductory survey, the book presents lectures on data analysis for multimedia libraries, pronunciation modeling for large vocabulary speech recognition, statistical language modeling, very large scale information retrieval, reduction of information variation in text, and a concluding chapter on open questions in research for linguistics in information access.

The book gives...

We are poised at a major turning point in the history of information management via computers. Recent evolutions in computing, communications, and commerce are fundamentally reshaping the ways in which we humans interact with information, and generating enormous volumes of electronic data along the way. As a result of these forces, what will data management technologies, and their supporting software and system architectures, look like in ten years? It is difficult to say, but we can see the future taking shape now in a new generation of information access platforms that combine strategies...