It is our great pleasure to introduce the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference “Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective” (Baltic HLT 2014).

This volume contains papers presented at the Sixth International Conference “Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective” (Baltic HLT 2014), held in Kaunas, Lithuania on 26–27 September 2014. The conference traditionally gathers scientists from the Baltic region, where they discuss the most relevant problems which they face in their research, strengthen partnership and brainstorm new perspective ideas. The conference completes the second round of the Baltic HLT conferences which have been organised two times in Latvia (in 2004 and in 2010, in Riga), Estonia (in 2005, in Tallinn and in 2012, in Tartu), and Lithuania (in 2007 and in 2014, in Kaunas).

Baltic HLT 2014 is also important for gathering and consolidating ideas for the following reasons:

• a great urge for Baltic countries to establish and join international research infrastructures;

• possible participation in the EU Research and Innovation programme Horizons 2020 and in the new period of the EU structural funds (2014–2020).

We have received papers from a wide range of topics: syntactic analysis, sentiment analysis, coreference resolution, authorship attribution, information extraction, document clustering, machine translation, corpus and parallel corpus compiling, speech recognition and synthesis, and others. There were a total of 51 submissions received. 21 were accepted as full papers and 19 were accepted as short papers.

The Baltic HLT 2014 programme features presentations that are divided into three HLT branches: namely, speech technology (7 papers), methods in computational linguistics (16 papers), and preparation of language resources (16 papers).

The conference features four invited speakers who overview important and actual topics: Steven Krauwer (Holland, CLARIN ERIC) delivers the presentation on the importance of CLARIN, Walter Daelemans (Belgium, Antwerp University) – on computational stylometry, Adam Kilgarriff (UK, Lexical Computing Ltd.) – on corpus evaluation, Ruta Petrauskaite (Lithuania, LMT) – on the future perspectives of language technologies in the Baltics.

We want to express our gratitude to all the people who helped to organize and support this conference. We are indebted to all the members of the programme committee for their detailed inspection of all submitted work and for their valuable comments. We thank Gailius Raškinis and Vytautas Rudžionis for reviewing and editing papers on speech recognition and synthesis, Irena Markievicz for setting up the conference website, Darius Amilevicius for advice on financial matters. A special thanks to the local organizing committee and ViaConventus who helped to make Baltic HLT 2014 a memorable event.

Andrius Utka,

Gintarė Grigonytė,

Jurgita Kapočiūtė-Dzikienė,

and Jurgita Vaičenonienė