This volume is based on a workshop held on September 13, 2001 in New Orleans, LA, USA as part of the 24th Annual International ACMSIGIR Conferenceon Research and Development in Information Retrieval. The title of the workshop was: “Information Retrieval Techniques for Speech Applications.” Interest in speech applications dates back a number of decades. However, it is only in the last few years that automatic speech recognition has left the confines of the basic research lab and become a viable commercial application. Speech recognition technology has now matured to the point where speech can be used to interact with automated phone systems, control computer programs, and even create memos and documents. Moving beyond computer control and dictation, speech recognition has the potential to dramatically change the way we create, capture, and store knowledge. Advances in speech recognition technology combined with ever decreasing storage costs and processors that double in power every eighteen months have set the stage for a whole new era of applications that treat speech in the same way that we currently treat text. The goal of this workshop was to explore the technical issues involved in a- lying information retrieval and text analysis technologies in the new application domain senabled by automatic speech recognition. These possibilities bring with them a number of issues, questions, and problems. Speech-based user interfaces create different expectations for the end user, which in turn places different - mands on the back-end systems that must interact with the user and interpret the user’s commands. Speech recognition will never be perfect, so analyses- plied to the resulting transcripts must be robust in the face of recognition errors. The ability to capture speech and apply speech recognition on smaller, more - werful, pervasivedevices suggests that text analysis and mining technologies can be applied in new domains never before considered.