Call for papers

Purpose

A two-day workshop on Natural Language Technology will be organised by the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA). This event will be the third annual installment of the workshop in its most-recent incarnation, and the continuation of an annual workshop series that has existed under various guises since the early 90s.

It will be held in conjunction with a tutorial day, also at the University of Sydney, on 9 December, 2005.

The goals of the workshop are:

• to bring together the growing Language Technology (LT) community in Australia and New Zealand and encourage interactions;
• to encourage interactions between this community and the international LT community;
• to foster interaction between academic and industrial researchers;
• to encourage dissemination of research results;
• to provide a forum for 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.

An innovation in this year's Australasian Language Technology Workshop will be the introduction of poster presentations in addition to the regular talks, in order to encourage more interactive discussion of research-in-progress. In this vein, we encourage submissions from students describing their thesis work and any preliminary results. Note that both publication types will have the same status in the proceedings.

Program committee

• Ash Asudeh (University of Canterbury)
• Eric Atwell (Leeds University)
• Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne)
• Steven Bird (University of Melbourne)
• Lawrence Cavedon (NICTA Victoria)
• Trevor Cohen (University of Melbourne)
• James Curran (Sydney University)
• Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp)
• Robert Dale (Macquarie University)
• Dominique Estival (Defence Science and Technology Organisation)
• Dan Flickinger (Stanford University)
• Tanja Gaustad (Appen)
• Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)
• Ben Hutchinson (University of Edinburgh)
• Jong-bok Kim (Kyung Hee University)
• Alistair Knott (University of Otago)
• Valia Kordoni (University of Saarland)
• Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh)
• Hang Li (Microsoft Research)
• Diana McCarthy (University of Sussex)
• Daniel Midgley (University of Western Australia)
• Diego Molla (Macquarie University)
• Kyonghee Paik (KLI Language and Translation)
• Ajeet Parhar (Telstra Research Laboratories)
• Cécile Paris (CSIRO ICT Centre)
• Jon Patrick (University of Sydney)
• David Powers (Flinders University)
• Tony Smith (Waikato University)
• Harold Somers (University of Manchester)
• Nicola Stokes (NICTA Victoria)
• Takaaki Tanaka (NTT Communication Science Laboratories)
• Aline Villavicencio (University of Essex)
• Menno van Zaanen (Macquarie University)
• Simon Zwarts (Macquarie University)

Organisers

• Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne -- co-chair)
• James Curran (University of Sydney -- local organiser)
• Menno van Zaanen (Macquarie University -- co-chair)

Topics

We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to:

• speech understanding and generation;
• phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and
• discourse;
• interpreting and generating spoken and written language;
• linguistic, mathematical, and psychological models of language;
• language-oriented information extraction and retrieval;
• corpus-based and statistical language modelling;
• summarisation;
• machine translation and translation aids;
• natural language interfaces and dialogue systems;
• natural language and multimodal systems;
• message and narrative understanding systems;
• evaluations of language systems;
• computational lexicography.

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.

Submission format

Submissions should follow the two-column format of the ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. 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 as a tarball here. We reserve the right to reject submissions that do not conform to these styles including font and page size restrictions.

The preferred submission format is PDF. If this introduces problems, please contact the organisers beforehand.

If we cannot print your 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.

The workshop will adopt a "single-blind" refereeing process: the reviewers will be made aware of the identity of the authors of submitted papers, but the identity of the reviewers will not be revealed to the authors. As such, all papers should include the full authors' names and affiliations. Note that this diverges from the submission guidelines adopted for ACL conferences.

Submission procedure

You can send in your submissions using the automatic submission system. First, you need to register as a user. You then get an email containing the necessary login details. After you have logged in, you can upload your submission(s). You only have to register once, even if you want to upload several submissions. If you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact the ALTA Workshop 2005 organisers.

Important dates

• Paper submission: 15 September 2005
• Notification of acceptance: 15 October 2005
• Camera-ready copy: 1 November 2005
• Workshop: 10 - 11 December 2005

The Australasian Language Technology Workshop is being organised by ALTA, the Australasian Language Technology Association.