This volume contains papers presented at the Fifth International Conference “Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective” (Baltic HLT 2012), held in Tartu, Estonia on 4–5 October 2012.

Since its first edition in 2004, Baltic HLT has served as a special venue for new and ongoing work in computational linguistics and related disciplines in the Baltic states as well as in a broader geographical perspective.

The main aim of this conference is to provide a forum for the sharing of new ideas and recent advances in human language processing and to promote cooperation between the research communities of computer science and linguistics from the Baltic countries and the rest of the world. The conference brings together scientists, developers, providers and users to discuss state-of-the-art of human language technologies in the Baltic countries, to exchange information and to discuss problems, to find new synergies and to promote initiatives for international cooperation.

The call for papers for the fifth Baltic HLT laid special emphasis on multilinguality in language resources and on applications of human language technology, while also encouraging the potential authors to submit papers on other subfields of computational linguistics and related disciplines.

51 submissions were received; each submission was evaluated by at least two reviewers.

The Programme Committee consisted of 25 members from 13 different countries. Based on their scores and the comments they provided on the content and quality of the papers, 20 long papers and 20 posters or demos were accepted for presentation and publication.

The accepted submissions cover a wide range of topics: morphological disambiguation, dependency syntax and valency, computational semantics, named entities, dialogue modeling, terminology extraction and management, machine translation, corpus and parallel corpus compiling, speech modeling and multimodal communication. A few papers give a general overview of the state of the art of the human language technology and/or language resources in the Baltic states.

Completing the programme are the invited lectures by Lori Lamel “Multilingual Speech Processing Activities in Quaero: application to multimedia search in unstructured data” and Bente Maegaard “A Multilingual Research Infrastructure”.

We wish to express our gratitude to the members of the Programme Committee who worked hard to review all submissions.

We also want to thank the organizers and supporters of this conference: Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu and Estonian Ministry of Education and Research as funder of National Programme for Estonian Language Technology. The conference is also supported by the CLARIN and META-NORD projects.

Arvi Tavast

Kadri Muischnek

Kadri Vider

Mare Koit