The Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD) Conference 2002, it should be noticed, is now being held for the ?fth time and we are pleased to observe that in its short history it has turned out to be an international forum successfully intertwining the basic ?elds of NLP. It is our strong hope that the conference contributes to a better understanding between researchers from the various areas and promotes more intensive mutual cooperation. So far the communication between man and computers has displayed a one-way nature, humans have to know how the - chines work and only then can they “understand” them. The opposite, however, is still quite far from being real, our understanding of how our “user-friendly” computers can understand us humans is not deep enough yet. A lot of work has to be done both in the near and distant future. Let TSD 2002 be a modest contribution to this goal. The conference also serves well in its second purpose: to facilitate researchers meeting in the NLP ?eld from Western and Eastern Europe. Moreover, many participants now come from other parts of the world, thus making TSD a real crossroadsforresearchersintheNLParea. Thisvolumecontainstheproceedings of this conference held in Brno, September 9–12, 2002. We were honored to have as keynote speakers James Pustejovsky from Brandeis University, and Ronald Cole from the University of Colorado. We would like to thank all the Program Committee members and external reviewers for their conscientious and diligent reviewing work.
