Dear Friends,

It is our pleasure to welcome you to Aruba for the first workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT), sponsored by IEEE and ACL. Our goal for initiating this workshop was to bring the speech and language communities together to discuss and present advances and challenges in the area of spoken language processing. Bringing those communities together is much easier to do in smaller workshops than larger conferences especially when attempting to grow new research areas and evolve new trends. The SLT workshop is complementary to the IEEE ASRU workshop, which traditionally focuses on core speech and signal processing technologies. The SLT workshop addresses spoken language communication technologies including language understanding, dialog, mining, translation, multimodal, summarization, user interface, topic detection, and generation.

We hope you will enjoy the technical program we have put together. We received nearly 120 papers and decided to set the acceptance rate to just under 50%. This is quite impressive given that it is a first time workshop. We would like to thank the scientific and review committees for helping us to review the submissions and coordinate the technical program. We are also grateful to our keynote and invited speakers for accepting our invitation to present a variety of topics in the area of spoken language technology and its business applications.

Please take the time to enjoy beautiful Aruba. Aruba is located in the heart of the southern Caribbean, 15 miles off the coast of Venezuela. Aruba, an island of white sand beaches and blue waters, is the pride of the Dutch Caribbean. When ones travels to Aruba they will encounter great weather all year round, a safe environment, and unique scenic beauty with unmatched crystal clear waters.

Finally, we would like to extend our sincere thanks to the organizing committee, Brian, Eric, Gokhan, and Roberto, and Nancy from IEEE as well as Billene and Lance from Conference Management Services for working really hard over the past 18 months to organize this wonderful workshop and coordinate the various social and technical activities. We look forward to a very exciting event and will do the best we can to make this workshop and your stay in Aruba enjoyable to all of you.

Mazin Gilbert, General Chair.
Hermann Ney, Co-Chair.