ALTA 2014 Workshop CFP

This year the Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA) will be held at the RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, on Wednesday 26 - Friday 28 November. This event will be the twelfth annual instalment of the ALTA Workshop in its current 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 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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to: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;
topic modelling and unsupervised language analysis;
social media analysis and processing;
domain-specific adaptation of natural language processing algorithms.

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 2014 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.

Please refer to Instructions for Authors for more information.

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

With the generous support of our sponsors, ALTA will be offering travel support for students to attend and present at ALTA 2014. See the workshop website for details.

Invited speakers

We are working to line up exciting speakers for the event. We will announce them when they are confirmed.

Tutorials

We are pleased to announce the following tutorial at ALTA 2014:

Presenter: Dr. Trevor Cohn

Title: Gaussian Processes for NLP

Short Description:

Gaussian Processes are a powerful Bayesian modelling framework, which holds considerable potential in language processing. The tutorial will present fundamentals of Gaussian Processes and survey several NLP tasks where GPs have been deployed successfully.

Tutorial 2

Presenter: Dr. Gholamreza Haffari

Title: Machine Learning Approaches for Dealing with Limited Bilingual Data in Statistical Machine Translation

Short Description:

High quality translation output in Statistical machine translation (SMT) is dependent on the availability of massive amounts of parallel text in the source and target language. There are a large number of languages that are considered "low-density", either because the population speaking the language is not very large, or even if millions of people speak the language, insufficient online resources are available in that language. This tutorial covers machine learning approaches for dealing with such situations in SMT where the amount of available bilingual data is limited.

Important dates

Submission deadline: 19 September 2014 (23:59 GMT +10:00)
Notification: 24 October 2014
Final camera-ready copy: 7 November 2014
ALTA Tutorial: 26 November 2014
ALTA Workshop: 27 -- 28 November 2014

Workshop co-chairs

Gabriela Ferraro (NICTA)
Stephen Wan (CSIRO)

Programme committee

Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne)
Wray Buntine (Monash University)
Alicia Burga (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Lawrence Cavedon (RMIT University)
Nathalie Colineau (DSTO)
Trevor Cohn (Melbourne University)
Lan Du (Macquarie University)
Dominique Estival (University of Western Sydney)
Ben Hachey (University of Sydney)
Gholamreza Haffari (Monash University)
Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)
Nitin Indurkhya (University of New South Wales)
Sarvnaz Karimi (CSIRO)
Su Nam Kim (Monash University)
Alistair Knott (University of Otago)
François Lareau (Université de Montréal)
David Martinez (University of Melbourne)
Tara Mcinkintosh (Google)
Meladel Mistica (Intel Corporation)
Diego Molla (Macquarie University)
Anthony Nguyen (The Australian e-Health Research Centre)
Joel Nothman (University of Sydney)
Scott Nowson (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Cecile Paris (CSIRO)
David Powers (Flinders University)
Lizhen Qu (NICTA)
Will Radford (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Andrea Schalley (Griffith University)
Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University)
Karin Verspoor (The University of Melbourne)
Ingrid Zukerman (Monash University)

Workshop local organisers

Lawrence Cavedon (RMIT)

We are pleased to be working with Falk Scholer (RMIT) to organise the co-located event: the Australian Document Computing Symposium.

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).