From the site: "The International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assesment Techniques, Cocosda, has been established to encourage and promote international interaction and cooperation in the foundation areas of Spoken Language Processing, especially for Speech Input/Output. The importance of collaboration which transcends national boundaries is increasingly recognized. This is both because of the practical and scientific value attached to systematic work which encompasses a range of languages and analytic approaches and also because of the practical need to establish common methods of performance description and quantitative comparison."