Note from the editor: “Expositions of Romanian scientists on the design of text-to-speech synthesis and natural language understanding and generation systems”

Abstract

This special issue of the Journal is devoted to the assorted work of twelve Romanian speech scientists who have brought sharp analytical insights and new methodological approaches to the design of high performing text-to-speech (TTS) and natural language understanding and generation systems. Volume 12, No. 2 consists of five papers. Each paper, albeit addressing a different aspect of speech synthesis and natural language processing, is like the others in the rigorous diligence and precision of the author’s scientific scrutiny. The contributors to this special issue have served their Romanian academic and research institutions with distinction, while adding to the vast body of research in speech technology through diverse publications in the professional literature, not to mention their presentations at various academic conferences and workshops. The inspiration for this special issue comes from individuals such as Dan Tufis of the Romanian Academy, Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Back in 2004, I had the pleasure of hearing Dan give an enlightening presentation on multilingual word sense disambiguation (WSD) at the annual Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science workshop, an event chaired by Bernadette Sharp of Staffordshire University. Several years later, when I became IJST’s Editor-in-Chief, I explored the Journal’s archives and found a compelling special issue dealing with speech technology research taking place in Romania (Volume 5, No. 3, September 2002). The guest editor of that issue, Dragos Burlieanu of Politehnica University of Bucharest, working under the auspices of the Journal’s then-Editor-in-Chief