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Call for Papers

3rd and 4th December 2009, Sydney, Australia

http://alta.asn.au/events/alta2009

to be held as part of HCSNet SummerFest 2009

http://sf09.hcsnet.edu.au/

Submissions deadline: Monday 28th September 2009

Overview

This year, the Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA) will be held as part of the HCSNet Summerfest at the University of New South Wales in Sydney on Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th of December 2009. This event will be the seventh annual installment of the ALTA Workshop in its most-recent incarnation, and the continuation of an annual workshop series that has existed under various guises since the early 90s.

The goals of the ALTA workshop are:

• to bring together the growing Language Technology (LT) community in Australia and New Zealand and encourage interactions;
• to encourage interactions and collaboration within this community and with the wider international LT community;
• to foster interaction between academic and industrial researchers, to encourage dissemination of research results;
• to provide a forum for the discussion of new and ongoing research and projects;
• to provide an opportunity for the broader artificial intelligence community to become aware of local LT research; and, finally,
• to increase visibility of LT research in Australia, New Zealand and overseas.

Topics

We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to:

• phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse;
• speech understanding and generation;
• interpreting and generating spoken and written language;
• linguistic, mathematical, and psychological models of language;
• language-oriented information extraction and retrieval;
• corpus-based and statistical language modelling;
• machine translation and translation aids;
• question answering and information extraction;
• natural language interfaces and dialogue systems;
• natural language and multimodal systems;
• message and narrative understanding systems;
• evaluations of language systems;
• embodied conversational agents;
• computational lexicography;
• summarisation.

We welcome submissions on any topic that is of interest to the LT community, and particularly encourage submissions that broaden the scope of our community through the consideration of practical LT applications and through multi-disciplinary research. We also specifically encourage submissions from industry.

Submission Format

All submissions should follow the ACL style guidelines and must be in PDF format.

Full paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus one extra page for references. Accepted full papers will be presented orally at the workshop.

Short paper submissions should also follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings without exceeding four (4) pages of content plus one extra page for references. Accepted short papers will be presented as posters at the workshop.

Note that full papers can be accepted as short papers as determined by the program committee. Full papers will be distinguished from short papers in the proceedings.

We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. The style files and example documents are available from the workshop website.We reserve the right to reject submissions that do not conform to these styles including font and page size restrictions.

If we cannot print your PDF file by the submission date it will be rejected without being reviewed. Therefore you are encouraged to send an early version with the typographical complexity of your final intended version so that we can check it is printable. All papers should include the full authors' names and affiliations. (Note that this diverges from the "blind" submission guidelines adopted for ACL conferences.) Detailed directions for submission will be made available at the workshop website. Contact the organisers for any questions regarding this process.

Proceedings

A proceedings containing all papers (full paper and short paper submissions) will be produced and published by HCSNet in CD-ROM format. The full proceedings volume will also be published online on the website of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA).

Important Dates

• Submissions deadline: Monday 28th September 2009
• Accept/reject: Monday 12th October 2009
• Final camera ready: Monday 9th November 2009
• ALTA Workshop: Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th December 2009

Workshop Co-Chairs

• Luiz Augusto Pizzato (University of Sydney)
• Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University)

Programm Committee

• Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne)
• Steven Bird (University of Melbourne)
• Lawrence Cavedon (National ICT Australia, Melbourne)
• Eric Choi (National ICT Australia, Sydney)
• Peter Clark (Boeing)
• Nathalie Colineau (CSIRO)
• Nigel Collier (NII - National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
• James Curran (University of Sydney)
• Robert Dale (Macquarie University)
• Jean-Yves Delort (CMCRC)
• Joachim Diederich (James Cook University)
• Mark Dras (Macquarie University)
• Dominique Estival (University of Sydney)
• Caroline Gasperin (USP/ICMC, Brasil)
• Ben Hachey (CMCRC)
• Michael Hess (University of Zuerich)
• Achim Hoffmann (University of New South Wales)
• Matthew Honnibal (University of Sydney)
• Alistair Knott (University of Otago)
• Kazunori Komatani (Kyoto University)
• Andrew Lampert (CSIRO)
• David Martinez (University of Melbourne)
• Tara E. McIntosh (University of Sydney)
• Diego Mollá Aliod (Macquarie University)
• Cecile Paris (CSIRO)
• David M. W. Powers (Flinders University)
• Adam Saulwick (DSTO)
• Harold Somers (Dublin City University)
• Nicola Stokes (University College Dublin)
• Jette Viethen (Macquarie University)
• Martin Volk (University of Zuerich)
• Menno van Zaanen (Tilburg University)
• Simon Zwarts (Macquarie University)

Enquiries

The Australasian Language Technology Workshop is being organised by ALTA, the Australasian Language Technology Association. For any comments or questions about the workshop please contact the organizers at http://workshop@alta.asn.au.

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We would like to congratulate the winners of the best paper and best presentation awards:

Best paper award

Susan Howlet and James Curran: "Automatic Acquisition of Training Data for Statistical Parsers"

Best presentation award

Tara McIntosh and James R Curran: "Weighted Mutual Exclusion Bootstrapping for Domain Independent Lexicon and Template Acquisition"

We would also like to thank all the authors who submitted papers, the members of the program committee for the time and effort they contributed in reviewing the papers; Rosie Jones (Yahoo!) for joining us as Keynote Speaker, as well as ADCS for their joint support of the conference and keynotes. Our thanks also go to local organizers Dipak Bhandari and Shlomo Berkovsky (CSIRO), to webmasters Darius Pfitzner and Richard Leibbrandt (Flinders University) for their logistical support, to members of the ALTA executive for their assistance in organizing the workshop, and to our sponsors (NICTA and CSIRO) who enabled us in particular to support student participation and accommodation, as well as free registration for all early registrants.

Thanks to HCSNet we were able to run this event at all. Thanks to ALS we had food and drinks for the competitors. Thanks to Appen, the Macquarie Dictionary and Franklin Electronic Publishers we have as prizes books and hand-held electronic Macquarie Schools Dictionaries (which include material from the Macquarie Dictionary of Aboriginal languages)

The results are now available on the OzCLO website

It was such fun, and the students seemed so pleased and excited by problem solving, that we plan to run the Olympiad again next year. We'd like to hold the event earlier than June/August, and this time to make it truly nation-wide, covering all states. But this requires a lot of lead time - letting the schools know, getting them to do training sessions, and so on. We plan to put out soon a call for expressions of interest in being involved in the 2009 Computational and Linguistics Olympiad. In the meantime feel free to join the OzCLO GoogleGroup for running it. Or else talk to one of us:

• Dominique Estival
• Jean Mulder
• Rachel Nordlinger
• Jane Simpson
• Diego Molla