Essential Speech and Language Technology for Dutch : Results by the STEVIN programme The book provides an overview of more than a decade of joint R&D efforts in the Low Countries on HLT for Dutch. It not only presents the state of the art of HLT for Dutch in the areas covered but even more importantly a description of the resources (data and tools) for Dutch that have been created are now available for both academia and industry worldwide. The contributions cover many areas of human language technology (for Dutch): corpus collection (including IPR issues) and building (in particular one corpus aiming at a collection of 500M word tokens) lexicology anaphora resolution a semantic network parsing technology speech recognition machine translation text (summaries) generation web mining information extraction and text to speech to name the most important ones. The book also shows how a medium sized language community (spanning two territories) can create a digital language infrastructure (resources tools etc.) as a basis for subsequent R&D. At the same time it bundles contributions of almost all the HLT research groups in Flanders and the Netherlands hence offers a view of their recent research activities. Targeted readers are mainly researchers in human language technology in particular those focusing on Dutch. It concerns researchers active in larger networks such as the CLARIN META NET FLaReNet and participating in conferences such as ACL EACL NAACL COLING RANLP CICling LREC CLIN and DIR ( both in the Low Countries) InterSpeech ASRU ICASSP ISCA EUSIPCO CLEF TREC etc. In addition some chapters are interesting for human language technology policy makers and even for science policy makers in general Foreword. by Linde van den Bosch Introduction Peter Spyns Part I. How it started 2.The STEVIN Programme: Result of Five Years Cross Border HLT for Dutch Policy Preparation. P.Spyns and E.D’Halleweyn Part II. HLT Resource project Related Papers 3.The JASMIN Speech Corpus: Recordings of Children Non Natives and Elderly People. C. Cucchiarini and H. Van Hamme 4.Resources Developed in the Autonomata Projects. H.van den Heuvel J P.Martens G.Bloothooft M.Schraagen N.Konings K.D’hanens and Q.Yang 5.STEVIN can Praat. D.Weenink 6.SPRAAK: Speech Processing Recognition and Automatic Annotation Kit. P.Wambacq K.Demuynck and D.Van Compernolle 7.COREA: Coreference Resolution for Extracting Answers for Dutch. I.Hendrickx G.Bouma W.Daelemans and V.Hoste 8.Automatic Tree Matching for Analysing Semantic Similarity in Comparable Text. E.Marsi and E.Krahmer 9.Large Scale Syntactic Annotation of Written Dutch: Lassy. G.van Noord G.Bouma F.van Eynde D.de Kok J.van der Linde I.Schuurman E.Tjong Kim Sang and V.Vandeghinste 10.Cornetto: a Combinatorial Lexical Semantic Database for Dutch. P.Vossen I.Maks R.Segers H.van der Vliet M F.Moens K.Hofmann E.Tjong Kim Sang and M.de Rijke 11.Dutch Parallel Corpus: a Balanced Parallel Corpus for Dutch English and Dutch French. H.Paulusen L.Macken W.Vandeweghe and P.Desmet 12.Identification and Lexical Representation of Multiword Expressions. J.Odijk 13.The Construction of a 500 million word Reference Corpus of Contemporary Written Dutch. N.Oostdijk M.Reynaert V.Hoste and I.Schuurman Part III. HLT Technology Related Papers 14.Lexical Modeling for Proper Name Recognition in Autonomata Too B.Réveil J P.Martens H.van den Heuvel G.Bloothooft and M.Schraagen 15.N Best 2008: a Benchmark Evaluation for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition in Dutch. D.A. van Leeuwen 16.Missing Data Solutions for Robust Speech Recognition. Y.Wang J.F.Gemmeke K.Demuynck and H.Van Hamme 17.Parse and Corpus based Machine Translation. V.Vandeghinste S.Martens G.Kotzé J.Tiedemann J.Van den Bogaert K.De Smet F.Van Eynde and G.van Noord Part IV.HLT Application Related Papers 18.Development and Integration of Speech technology into COurseware for Language Learning: the DISCO Project. H. Strik J. van Doremalen J. Colpaert and C. Cucchiarini 19.Question Answering of Informative Web Pages: How Summarisation Technology Helps. J.De Belder D.de Kok G.van Noord F.Nauze L.van der Beek and M F.Moens 20.Generating Refining and Using Sentiment Lexicons. M.de Rijke V.Jijkoun F.Laan W.Weerkamp P.Ackermans and G.Geleijnse Part V. And now 21.The Dutch Flemish HLT Agency: Managing the Lifecycle of STEVIN’s Language Resources. R.van Veenendaal L.van Eerten C.Cucchiarini and P.Spyns 22.Conclusions and Outlook to the Future. Jan Odijk