The preparation of the Fifth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics was done, without doubt, under extraordinary circumstances. To characterize the situation one only has to remember that since the Manchester conference there have been four governments on the territory of the former GDR, differing in every imaginable respect. The change in autumn 1989 and the unification on 3 October 1990 - the two outstanding events - were accompanied by an immense number of radical political, economic, and social changes which were not without consequences on the preparation of this conference. .
