Overview

This year, the 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. This event will be the ninth 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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to: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

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 paper submissions can be accepted as short papers as determined by the program committee. Full papers will be distinguished from short papers in the proceedings.

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

All dates are based on Sydney time (EST).

• Submissions deadline: Monday 19th September 2011 Monday 26th September 2011
• Accept/reject: Monday 10th October 2011 Friday 21st October 2011
• Final camera-ready copy: Monday 31st October 2011 Monday 7th November 2011
• ALTA Workshop: Thursday 1st and Friday 2nd December 2011

Workshop Co-Chairs

Program Committee

Workshop Local Organisers

Enquiries