Nuance Communications (the maker of speech-recognition software) made an announcement today that it has entered into a new collaboration with IBM.

According to an article on the HealthcareIT News web site, “the two companies aim to help advance the state-of-the-art in clinical language understanding (CLU) technologies.” Moreover, a team of leading natural language processing (NLP) researchers at IBM will collaborate with Nuance’s research and development team to integrate the their technologies.

The vice president of software in IBM Research, Charles Lickel, was quoted in the article: “With Nuance, we’ll work to ensure healthcare organizations can gain access to, and classify health data to improve patient outcomes and to help lower the cost of healthcare today.”