To improve the position of Dutch in the field of language and speech technology one not only needs an infrastructure and sufficient resources, one also needs people to carry out research and development. Most universities in the Netherlands offer programs (under various names) aiming at either computational linguistics or speech technology. These programs are typically located within the Faculty of Arts (the computational linguistics specialization of Computer Science at the University of Twente being the only exception). In Flanders, the possibilities for studying computational linguistics are limited to individual courses within a more general linguistics programme and postgraduate courses, while speech technology programs are exclusively offered within computer science departments
Several of our interview partners indicated that their institute or company had trouble finding adequate staff. This may be a consequence of the fact that computational linguistics is far more technical than the other programs within the Arts faculties, and tends to attract only small numbers of students. As the field of language and speech technology matures, it puts a stronger emphasis on applied, data-oriented, and statistical research. This tendency appears to be an indication that education programs should be organized more as interdisciplinary studies, open not only to Arts students, but also to students with a background in Computer Science and related fields.
The possibilities for creating such interdisciplinary programs on language and speech technology are limited at the moment. However, there are several European Socrates projects aiming at the innovation of programs for language and speech technology (the ACOHUM network working group on computational linguistics and language engineering, the Phonetics and Speech communication thematic network, and the proposed ``European Masters in Language and Speech'') which might provide input to further development of these ideas.