Overview

This year the Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA) will be held at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand from Tuesday 4 December to Thursday 6 December. This event will be the tenth 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. For the first time ALTA will take place outside of Australia, and correspondingly this year's workshop targets a more-international audience.

The goals of the ALTA workshop are:

• to bring together the growing Language Technology (LT) community in the Australasian region 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 Australasia 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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to: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;
• language resources;
• social media analysis and processing.

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 2012 style guidelines and must be in PDF format.

Full paper submissions may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus any number of pages consisting of only references. Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus any number of pages consisting of only references. All submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings. Full papers will be distinguished from short papers in the proceedings.

Papers will be presented either orally or as posters at the workshop. There will be no distinction between papers presented orally and those presented as posters 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 ...". Papers not conforming to these requirements will be rejected without review.

We strongly recommend the use of the ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. The style files and example documents will be 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.

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).

Student travel support

Due to the generous support of our sponsors, ALTA will be offering travel support for students to attend and present at ALTA 2012. See the workshop website for details.

Invited speakers (confirmed so far)

Chris Brockett (Microsoft Research)
Diverse Words, Shared Meanings: Statistical Machine Translation for Paraphrase, Grounding, and Intent

Further details on the invited talks

Tutorials (confirmed so far)

We are pleased to announce that ALTA2012 will include pre-workshop tutorials on 4 December 2012.

Biomedical Natural Language Processing
David Martinez (NICTA), Hanna Suominen (NICTA), and Karin Verspoor (NICTA)

A Crash Course in Statistical Natural Language Processing
James Curran (School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney)

Further details on the tutorials

Important dates (Updated)

• Submission deadline EXTENDED: 1 October 2012 (23:59 GMT +10:00)
• Notification: Monday 22 October 2012
• Final camera-ready copy: Monday 5 November 2012
• ALTA Tutorial: Tuesday 4 December 2012
• ALTA Workshop: Wednesday 5 December -- Thursday 6 December 2012

Workshop co-chairs

• Paul Cook (University of Melbourne)
• Scott Nowson (Appen Butler Hill)

Program committee

• Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne)
• Steven Bird (University of Melbourne)
• Wray Lindsay Buntine (NICTA)
• Lawrence Cavedon (NICTA and RMIT University)
• Nathalie Colineau (CSIRO - ICT Centre)
• Rebecca Dridan (University of Oslo)
• Alex Chengyu Fang (The City University of Hong Kong)
• Nitin Indurkhya (UNSW)
• Jong-Bok Kim (Kyung Hee University)
• Alistair Knott (University of Otago)
• Oi Yee Kwong (City University of Hong Kong)
• Francois Lareau (Macquarie University)
• Jey Han Lau (University of Melbourne)
• Fang Li (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
• Haizhou Li (Institute for Infocomm Research)
• Marco Lui (University of Melbourne)
• Ruli Manurung (Universitas Indonesia)
• David Martinez (NICTA VRL)
• Tara McIntosh (Wavii)
• Meladel Mistica (The Australian National University)
• Diego Molla (Macquarie University)
• Su Nam Kim (Monash University)
• Luiz Augusto Pizzato (University of Sydney)
• David Powers (Flinders University)
• Stijn De Saeger (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
• Andrea Schalley (Griffith University)
• Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University)
• Tony Smith (Waikato University)
• Virach Sornlertlamvanich (National Electronics and Computer Technology Center)
• Hanna Suominen (NICTA)
• Karin Verspoor (National ICT Australia)

Workshop local organisers

• Alistair Knott (University of Otago)

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 workshop organisers (workshop AT alta DOT asn DOT au).