Nordic Graduate School of Language Technology

NGSLT Board Meeting

16th April, 2008

13.30-16.30

Department of General Linguistics, seminar room 331

Helsinki University

Present: Ansis Ataols Berzins (Latvia, student representative), Robin Cooper (Sweden, chair), Vera Evdokimova (NW Russia, student representative), Peter Juel Henrichsen (Denmark), Mare Koit (Estonia), Kimmo Koskenniemi (Finland), Stina Ojala (Finland, student representative), Gailius Raskinis (Lithuania), Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson (Iceland), Inguna Skadina (Latvia), Pavel Skrelin (NW Russia, by videolink), Sylvana Sofkova Hashemi (Sweden), Torbjørn Svendsen (Norway)

  1. formalia
    It was decided that Robin and Sylvana would be secretary and that the minutes would be placed on the website for checking.
    The agenda was approved.
  2. information
    Robin and Kimmo informed about upcoming conferences: NGSLT will provide students presenting papers or posters at SLTC and GOTAL with financial support for travel costs (Other Activity application). Participants in VISPP Summer School can apply for financial support by the VISPP organizers.
    Robin and Kimmo also reported on the results of the NordForsk evaluation of NGSLT (the report is available on NGSLT's documents page) and on recent contacts with NordForsk
  3. minutes of last meeting (html)
    The outstanding actions listed (Item 3, 4 and 6) were discussed again:
    Item 3.
    Updateable versions of student information is still desirable. This measure requires implementation of a plone-system which is planned for the future, though not for the immediate future.
    Item 4.
    The issue of the mailing list with web archive concerning questions specific to Nordic LT was dropped as it is no longer required.
    Item 6.
    descriptions of existing courses on NGSLT's wiki (http://ngslt.org/wiki/view/Main/LocalCourses). It was decided that this should be taken over by NEALT - see further under items 7 and 8.
    Item 6 - summer school.
    The idea has been dropped due to lack of interest.
    Item 7 - course in Iceland
    A course on Information Extraction is going to take place in Iceland on April 21-24, 2008.
    Item 8 - secondary supervision
    Changes in the application for secondary supervision have been carried out.
  4. student issues (student representatives)
    The main issues the students had discussed at their meeting were:
    • students should be encouraged to apply for secondary supervision and lab visits
    • the mailing list for the discussion of general issues is not important right now
    • discussion about future and future courses
    • students should be encouraged to participate more actively in the planning of the school's activities
  5. budget information
    Robin presented a summary of our use of funds up to the end of 2007 and a projection up to the end of 2008 (pdf). We still have a positive balance left over from our start up year which is increasing from year to year. There is enough for activities during half a year, but it is still an open question if NGSLT will be allowed to make use of the money left in 2009.
  6. course information and planning
    Information was given concerning enrolment and attendance at courses currently running: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Java for HLT (all by GSLT).
    Three short courses will take place i April and May:
    • Information Extraction (Reykjavik University,Iceland,21-24 April),
    • A multi-agent approach to language acquisition,language grounding and language evolution (University of Helsinki, Finland, 5-9 May) and
    • Computational Phonology (Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania,12-16 May).
    Courses by GSLT for the autumn have been announced for application and there will also be two short courses organized by NW Russia and Norway.
    The policy for course participation was revised. The revised version appears on NGSLT's documents page.
  7. NGSLT future
    It is still unclear whether NGSLT can use the remaining funds year 2009. If we can we will continue with our normal activities. It was also discussed what areas could be developed further or could continue after NGSLT. The following possibilities were discussed:
    • industry funding
    • secondary supervision across the NGSLT countries (possibly exploiting video-meeting technology)
    • continuation of NGSLT at European level. Action Torbjørn Svendsen: make contact with Koenraad de Smedt and discuss the possibilities of continuing as a European graduate school. As a first option we could consider continuing with the NGSLT countries, but with European funding. But we could also consider expanding to include other European countries.
    • master courses at national and Nordic level involving people from various backgrounds.
  8. NEALT report
    Kimmo and Mare gave a report on NEALT. Mare, editor in chief for NEALT, gave a report on publications. Linköping university has agreed to provide electronic publication facilities for NEALT's journal. Call for submissions will be announced in 2008.
  9. date of next meeting
    19th November 2008 in connection with the Swedish Language Technology Conference, SLTC 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden.
  10. any other business
    No other business.
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