Here are the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2006. The book presents 87 revised full papers together with 2 invited papers reviewing state-of-the-art research in the field of natural language processing. Coverage ranges from theoretical and methodological issues to applications with special focus on corpora, texts and transcription, speech analysis, recognition and synthesis, as well as their intertwining within NL dialogue systems.

This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 International Conference on “Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions” held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 15–18, 2008. The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www. cost. esf. org/domains_actions/ict) in the - main of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the research advances developed within COST Action 2102: “Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication” http://cost2102. cs. stir. ac. uk. COST 2102 research networking has contributed to modifying the conventional theoretical approach to the cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communi- tion changing the concept of face to face communication with that of body to body communication as well as developing the idea of embodied information. Information is no longer the result of a difference in perception and is no longer measured in terms of quantity of stimuli, since the research developed in COST 2102 has proved that human information processing is a nonlinear process that cannot be seen as the sum of the numerous pieces of information available. Considering simply the pieces of inf- mation available, results in a model of the receiver as a mere decoder, and produces a huge simplification of the communication process.

The two-volume set LNCS 7324/7325 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Image and Recognition, ICIAR 2012, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in June 2012. The 107 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 207 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on clustering and classification; image processing; image analysis; motion analysis and tracking; shape representation; 3D imaging; applications; biometrics and face recognition; human activity recognition; biomedical image analysis; retinal image analysis; and call detection and modeling.

This book constitutes of the major results of the EU COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) Action 277: NSP, Nonlinear Speech Processing, running from April 2001 to June 2005. Coverage includes such areas as speech analysis for speech synthesis, speech recognition, speech-non speech discrimination and voice quality assessment, speech enhancement, and emotional state detection.