The following document contains answers to questions that are asked frequently by The Speech Technology Forum users.
The Speech Technology Forum is a moderated discussion board. Its purpose is to provide an electronic discussion forum that is accessible to anyone regarding ALL speech technology related discussions. Users can initiate and contribute to conversations. Conversations are monitored and organized by moderators and only edited if there is profanity or SPAM. The Speech Technology Forum can work exactly like a mailing list when you register and ask for email notification.
The Speech Technology Forum is organized into topics; each topic may have subtopics, and so on. The basic topic structure is set up by the board administrator and the topic moderators. Within each subtopic are conversations about an aspect of the topic and/or additional subtopics. Users can post messages to these conversations and/or create new conversations within the structure. If you want to add a new topic, or would even like to run your own topic, you may request to do so.
Anyone with access to the World Wide Web may access The Speech Technology Forum and read any of the posts on The Speech Technology Forum. Users may post messages and create new subtopics (a user account may be required to do this). User accounts are created by discussion moderators.
If you do want to post anonymously, you can check the Post message as "Anonymous" option at the bottom of the posting form, in which case you will be referred to as "Anonymous" on the posting screen. However, a log is kept of all posts, and the board administrator or moderators can trace objectionable messages.
You can format your post using a set of formatting tags. You do not have to know HTML to use these formatting tags. A guide to using these formatting tags to format messages is available on the formatting page, available from the main menu.
At the discretion of the moderator, links to various World Wide Web (WWW) documents can be included on topic pages. When you click on a such link, you are brought away from The Speech Technology Forum. However, in most cases, the The Speech Technology Forum main menu is still displayed in the frame to the left of the screen. To get back to The Speech Technology Forum, either use your browser's back button or click on the "The Speech Technology Forum Topics" link from the The Speech Technology Forum main menu.
Depending on your browser and operating system, some special characters and formatting will not be displayed correctly. This is especially noticable with browsers below Netscape Navigator 3.0 and below Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0. Some fonts are specific to the Windows operating system and will not be displayed correctly on other platforms.
To contact moderators, click on the "Contact" link from the main menu or you may send email to forum@speechtechnology.com.
The Speech Technology Forum includes the ability for users to set up a "user profile." Users may specify their e-mail address, full name, and whether or not they want to receive e-mail notification of posts. Users may also change their passwords. To access the user profile editor, click on "User Profile" from the main menu. To create a User Profile, click on "Register for Password". The best thing about creating a user account is that you may go out of town, or not login for several days or weeks, then you can ask the system for your new messages and voila, all new messages are shown.
The most effective way to use the new message reader is to perform your search, checking for new messages since you last checked (by providing your username and password). When the results are displayed, choose to open the link in a new browser window. When you are finished reading the messages (and posting any replies), close the new window and then continue down the list of new messages.
The keyword search engine searches the text of messages in those topics that you select and returns the results based on the number of times that any of the keyword(s) appear on the page, i.e., an "or" search. You can perform a "custom search" to require or exclude words as follows:
Copyright © 1998, Kevin W. Paulisse and William F.
Polik, all rights reserved