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-- TrondTrosterud - 2017-05-18

NEALT President's report of the period ending on May 23, 2017

The Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) was founded in Gothenburg on October 28, 2006, and had its first business meeting at the NODALIDA-2007.

NEALT is registered as a Swedish association with a Swedish bank account. The University of Oslo maintaines the official NEALT web site for the association and a registry of members of the association. You can sign up as a member of NEALT via the website. Researchers who are engaged with language technology industry are requested to encourage these contacts to serve as supporting members of NEALT. Supporting members primarily sponsor students’ participation via student grants. For administration and special interest groups, there is a Wiki Page which can be used as a work space for involved partners

The association has the responsibility for the continuation of the NODALIDA conferences which have been successfully organized since 1977 (see the list of NODALIDAs and their sites). The NEALT Executive Committee appoints the chairpersons of the program committee and the local organization committee who then take the shared responsibility for organizing the conference according to the rules for NODALIDA conferences. The present executive committee gave this responsibility to Lars Borin from Gothenburg University and Jörg Tiedemann from Helsinki University. The board thanks the two for accepting this responsibility and further the local organization chair Nina Tahmasebi and co-chairs Yvonne Adesam and Martin Kaså for organizing a successful 2017 conference.

The NODALIDA conferences address the traditional Nordic countries as well as the three Baltic countries and NW Russia. As before, NEALT operates as an independent association but works in close cooperation with the ACL and its EACL chapter. NEALT wishes to coordinate its activities with these organizations as well as with the local Language Technology conferences in its region.

Another important task 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 together with the Editorial Board maintains the NEALT Proceedings Series and the Northern European Journal of Language Technology (NEJLT) which is a refereed high quality journal. In the beginning of 2016, Prof. Marco Kuhlmann took up the position as Editor in Chief. The publication of the NEALT Proceedings Series is done by Linköping University E-Press, where the NEJLT journal has been published from its inception. Following the suggestions of a survey in 2013 NEJLT has had a policy of thematic numbers, a special issue on LT for Uralic languages was published in 2016.

The association operates mostly through it special interest groups or SIGs, see the rules for SIGs. The following SIGs have been established: