Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2005, held in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, in September 2005. The 52 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers present a wealth of state-of-the-art research results in the field of natural language processing with an emphasis on text, speech, and spoken dialogue ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to applications in various fields, such as information retrieval, the semantic Web, algorithmic learning, classification and clustering, speaker recognition and verification, and dialogue management.