Latest ALTA News

ALTA Online Monthly Seminar Series – May 2026

ALTA is starting an online monthly seminar series featuring senior PhD students and postdocs from North America and Australia talking about all things NLP. The audience is intended to be a mix of Australian academics and industry professionals interested in NLP and LLMs. Our motivation is two-fold – education and awareness: we want to increase the exposure of NLP research and surface it to people outside NLP and academia.

Seminars will be held on the first Thursday of each month at 9:00 AM Australian Eastern Standard Time (roughly 2–4 PM Pacific Time or 5–7 PM Eastern Time, with some variation due to daylight saving).

The next seminar will be held on Thursday 7 May 2026, 9:00 AM AEST, online via Zoom. Featured speakers:

• Anudeex Shetty (PhD student, University of Melbourne) – From Monolithic to Pluralistic Alignment in LLMs
• Yao Dou (PhD student, Georgia Tech) – Scalable and Structured Evaluation of Large Language Models

See the May seminar poster for details. Information for the June seminar will be announced soon.

Interspeech 2026 in Sydney

ALTA is pleased to share Interspeech 2026, to be held in Sydney, Australia, 27 September – 1 October 2026. The conference theme is "Speaking Together".

Official conference website

ALTA 2025 Workshop

The 2025 Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop (ALTA 2025) will be held from the 26th to the 28th of November, 2025, in Sydney.

• Workshop website
• Publication ethics statement
• The call for papers is now available

ALTA 2025 Shared Task

The ALTA 2025 Shared Task is now open for participation. Submit your runs by 29 September!

• 2025 shared task website

ALTA 2025-2026 Election

Following the latest election, we are pleased to announce the positions for the executive committee:

• Jey Han Lau (president), University of Melbourne
• Diego Molla-Aliod (secretary), Macquarie University
• Meladel Mistica (treasurer), University of Melbourne
• Massimo Picardi (regular member), University of Technology Sydney
• Gabriela Ferraro (regular member), Australian National University
• Xiang Dai (regular member), CSIRO Data61
• Aditya Joshi (regular member), University of New South Wales
• Ming-Bin (Bryan) Chen (student representative), University of Melbourne

The Role of Research in Language Technology

The cutting-edge nature of Language Technology means that research is particularly important: there are many unsolved problems in the automated processing of spoken and written language, and in many cases we have only begun to scratch the surface. Research in Language Technology, which for our purposes covers a space that also includes Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics, draws on work in a diverse array of disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy and computer science, and now, with the increasing role played by statistical methods, also mathematics.

Research Activity in Australasia

Given the wide range of contributing disciplines, research in Language Technology in Australia and New Zealand is carried out in many different contexts. The listing below provides pointers to clusters of activity that involve more than one or two individual researchers.

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