Book excerpt: This book presents revised versions of the lectures given at the 8th ELSNET European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication held on the Island of Chios, Greece, in summer 2000. Besides an introductory survey, the book presents lectures on data analysis for multimedia libraries, pronunciation modeling for large vocabulary speech recognition, statistical language modeling, very large scale information retrieval, reduction of information variation in text, and a concluding chapter on open questions in research for linguistics in information access. The book gives newcomers to language and speech communication a clear overview of the main technologies and problems in the area. Researchers and professionals active in the area will appreciate the book as a concise review of the technologies used in text- and speech-triggered information access.