NEALT President's report of period ending 16 May 2009

The Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) was founded in Gothenburg on 28 October 2006 and had its first business meeting at the NODALIDA-2007 conference in Tartu, see the minutes of the business meeting on 26 May 2007 and the President's, Treasurer's and other reports presented then.

NEALT is registered as a Swedish association with a bank account, see the Treasurer's Report for further details.

The secretary, Janne Bondi Johannessen has maintained an official web site for the association, established a mailing list and a registry of members of the association, see http://omilia.uio.no/nealt. In addition, there is a Wiki (http://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/Nealt/) which can be used especially for SIGs and as a work space for NEALT purposes (and where this document is).

As before, NEALT operates as an independent association but it works in close cooperation with the ACL and its EACL chapter. NEALT recommends its members to join also ACL/EACL and wishes to coordinate its activities with these organizations.

The association has taken the responsibility of the continuation of the NODALIDA conferences which had been successfully organized since 1977 (see the list of NODALIDAs and their sites and dates). In effect, the NEALT appoints the program committee and local organization committee chairpersons, who then take the shared responsibility for organizing the conference, see the rules for NODALIDA conferences. The NODALIDA conferences now address the three Baltic countries and NW Russia in addition to the traditional Nordic countries.

One of the most important tasks of the association is to host publications, for which purpose one member of the Executive Board is the Editor in Chief heading the Editorial Board. The Editor in Chief, Mare Koit with the Editorial Board has started publication series of the association including NEALT Proceedings Series with three volumes during this period and monographs and reports (ready for volumes to be published), and recently the Northern European Journal of Language Technology (NEJLT) which is a refereed high quality journal soon to publish its first articles, see also the administrative organization for NEJLT.

The association operates mostly through it special interest groups or SIGs, see the rules for SIGs. The following SIGs have been established and some further ones are emerging:

-- KimmoKoskenniemi - 2009-05-05