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26/7/2011 Call For Papers for ALTA 2011 Workshop in Canberra

The 2011 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA) will be held at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra on Thursday 1st and Friday 2nd of December 2011.

The Call For Papers is now available, with submissions due by Monday 19th September 2011.

The ALTA Workshop will be held in conjunction with langfest 2011, which includes the 2nd combined conference of the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) and the Applied Linguistics Association of New Zealand (ALANZ), as well as the 42nd Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society (ALS).

1/7/2011 Take Part in the Second Language Technology Programming Competition

The Australasian Language Technology Association is organising a programming competition for university undergraduate and Masters students.

Following on the success of last year's competition, the Language Technology Programming Competition is formatted as a "shared task": all participants compete to salve the same problem. The problem highlights an active area of research and programming in the area of language technology. You can easily obtain reasonable results with little effort yet nobody has managed to obtain 100% correct results so far.

The winner to the competition will be invited to the workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA 2011) at Canberra on 1-2 December.

The key dates are:

• Right Now - Registration and release of training and development data
• 4 Oct 2011 - Release of test data
• 7 Oct 2011 - Deadline of submission of results
• 12 Oct 2011 - Notification of results
• 28 Oct 2011 - Deadline of submission of system description poster
• 1-2 Dec 2011 - ALTA workshop at Canberra

Details of the task and registration are available at (the competition website).

9/2/2011 ALTA 2010 Proceedings now available from the ACL Anthology

The ALTA 2010 Proceedings are now available from the ACL Anthology.

Also newly available in the Anthology are the ALTA 2003 and ALTA 2004 proceedings. The ACL Anthology now holds a complete collection of ALTA proceedings from 2003 to 2010 inclusive.

7/2/2011 ALTA 2010 A Great Success

ALTA 2010 is now (well and truly) over and was a roaring success! We had more than 60 people register for the workshop, and all sessions were very well attended. Two successful new activities at ALTA 2010 were the shared programming task, and the industry workshop. Based on the very positive feedback, we hope to build upon these activities at future ALTA events.

Two papers were jointly awarded the best paper award:

• Variability and Consistency in the Idiosyncratic Selection of Fillers in Japanese Monologues: Gender Differences by Shunichi Ishihara; and
• Speaker-Dependent Variation in Content Selection for Referring Expression Generation by Jette Viethen and Robert Dale

Congratulations to Shunichi, Jette and Robert.

Attendees had lots of feedback and suggested some great ideas for the ALTA Exec to follow-up on in 2011. If you have any suggestions or feedback on what ALTA can do to advance language technology in Australasia, don't hesitate to email Andrew Lampert (secretary@alta.asn.au).