AUSTRALASIAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP (ALTA 2010)

Overview

This year, the Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA) will be held at the University of Melbourne in Melbourne on Thursday 9th and Friday 10th of December 2010. This event will be the eighth 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 students and young researchers to present their research;
• to facilitate 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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to: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 spoken and written language;
• natural language generation;
• linguistic, mathematical, and psychological models of language;
• nlp-based 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.

This year, reviewing of papers will be double-blind. Therefore, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith (1991) previously showed ...".

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. Detailed directions for submission will be made available at the workshop website. Contact the organisers for any questions regarding this process.

Proceedings

The full proceedings volume will have an ISSN and will be published online on the ACL anthology website as well as the website of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA).

Important Dates

• Submissions deadline: Monday 20th September 2010
• Accept/reject: Monday 11th October 2010
• Final camera-ready copy: Monday 1st November 2010
• ALTA Workshop: Thursday 9th and Friday 10th December 2010

Workshop Co-Chairs

• Nitin Indurkhya (University of New South Wales and eBay Research Labs)
• Simon Zwarts (Macquarie University)

Program Committee

• Achim Hoffmann (University of New South Wales)
• Adam Saulwick (DSTO)
• Alistair Knott (University of Otago, New Zealand)
• Andrea Schalley (Griffith University)
• Andrew Lampert (CSIRO)
• Ben Hachey (CMCRC)
• Caroline Gasperin (Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brasil)
• Cecile Paris (CSIRO)
• David M. W. Powers (Flinders University)
• David Martinez (University of Melbourne)
• Diego Molla Aliod (Macquarie University)
• Dominique Estival (University of Sydney)
• Dongqiang Yang (Flinders University)
• Eric Choi (NICTA)
• Francis Bond (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
• Jean-Yves Delort (CMCRC)
• Jette Viethen (Macquarie University)
• Kazunori Komatani (Nagoya University, Japan)
• Luiz Augusto Sangoi Pizzato (University of Sydney)
• Mark Dras (Macquarie University)
• Matthew Honnibal (University of Sydney)
• Menno van Zaanen (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
• Nigel Collier (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
• Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University)
• Scott Nowson (Appen Pty Ltd)
• Son Bao Pham (Vietnam National University, Vietnam)
• Steven Bird (University of Melbourne)
• Tara McIntosh (NICTA)
• Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne)
• Wayne Wobcke (University of New South Wales)

Workshop Local Organisers

• David Martinez (University of Melbourne)
• Steven Bird (University of Melbourne)

Enquiries