Call For Papers

Overview

A two-day workshop on Natural Language Technology will be organised by the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA). This event will be the fourth 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.

ALTW will be held as part of HCSNet SummerFest, a multi-disciplinary event encompassing a number of workshops, invited courses and presentations around the theme of Human Communication Science. The courses, offered at both introductory and more advanced levels, will include topic areas aimed specifically at Language Technology students and researchers.

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 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 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.

As with the 2005 Workshop, there will be 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.

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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to: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 from the workshop website. 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. All papers should include the full authors' names and affiliations. (Note that this diverges from the "blind" submission guidelines adopted for ACL conferences.)

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

Proceedings

A proceedings containing all papers (presentations and posters) will be produced in paper and/or CD-ROM format. Each format will have an ISBN number.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: September 8, 2006 *** NOTE REVISED DEADLINE
• Submission date for Hons/Ugrad students: Sept 24, 2006 (see below)
• Notification of acceptance: October 3, 2006
• Camera-ready copy: October 17, 2006
• Workshop: Nov 30-Dec 1, 2006

*** We have instituted a later submission deadline for papers with **first-named** authors that are current Honours or Undergraduate students. If you qualify for this condition and plan to submit to this deadline then you must register an "Intention to Submit" with the workshop chairs by the normal submission due date (Sept 8). Send an email to workshop@alta.asn.au with title, authors, and abstract.

Workshop Co-Chairs

• Lawrence Cavedon (National ACT Australia and RMIT University)
• Ingrid Zukerman (Monash University)

Workshop Local Organiser

• Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University)

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 organizers at http://workshop@alta.asn.au.