Electronic Proceedings

Foreword

ALTW 2004 is the second workshop organised by the recently founded Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA), following previous Australasian Natural Language Processing Workshops. The first Australasian Natural Language Processing Workshop was held at Macquarie University, in 2001 and the second in Canberra in 2002. The first ALTW was held in Melbourne in 2003, in conjunction with a Summer School in Language Technology (ALTSS). ALTW is now ALTA's annual meeting. This year, ALTW and the Summer School in Language Technology are being held in conjunction with the Tenth Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology (SST 2004).

Every year, the number of submissions (including submissions from overseas) increases significantly, indicating both the growth of the research area in Australasia and the higher international visibility of the workshop. As a result, every year the standard of the workshop also increases. This year, as in previous years, each submission was a full paper and was reviewed by at least two members of an international programme committee of leading researchers in language technology, listed on the next page. We would like to thank the programme committee for their dedicated and careful review of the papers. The call for papers for ALTW solicited papers presenting substantial, original and unpublished research on all aspects of language technology. We have selected 22 papers for the workshop, which is organised in two parallel sessions.

We would like to thank the local organisers of ALTW/ALTSS and SST for their help in organising this workshop, in particular Diego Molla and Steve Cassidy. We would also like to thank the ALTA executive committee for assistance in various respects. Finally, we would like to thank the sponsors (DSTO, Appen, and VeCommerce) for their generous help in supporting the workshop, and Dominique Estival as the sponsorship coordinator.

As a final word, we hope you will all enjoy the workshop. We are very excited to see `that the language technology community in Australia and the region is vibrant and growing. We hope the workshop will once again foster interactions amongst researchers in language technology research.

Ash Asudeh, Cicile Paris and Stephen Wan
ALTW 2004 programme chairs
November 2004

ISBN Number: 0 9581946 1 0