Call For Papers
AUSTRALASIAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP (ALTA2008)
8-10 December 2008,
CSIRO ICT Centre, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
http://www.alta.asn.au/events/alta2008
in conjunction with the Australasian Document Computing Symposium
Overview
A two-day workshop on Natural Language Technology will be organised by the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA). This event will be the sixth annual instalment 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.
The ALTA Workshop (ALTW) will be held in conjunction with the Australian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS), which focuses on issues ranging from the fundamentals of document architectures and standards for mark up, through various aspects of document processing, and we will continue the tradition of holding a joint ADCS-ALTW session. This will be held on 8 December as the final session of ADCS and the opening session of ALTW.
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 2007 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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to:
- phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse;
- linguistic, mathematical, and psychological models of language;
- interpreting and generating spoken and written language;
- language-oriented information extraction and retrieval;
- natural language interfaces and dialogue systems;
- corpus-based and statistical language modelling;
- message and narrative understanding systems;
- information retrieval and question answering;
- natural language and multimodal systems;
- machine translation and translation aids;
- speech understanding and generation;
- 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 Format
Submissions should follow the two-column format of the ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, NOT 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 online and CD-ROM formats. The online format will have an ISSN number.
Important Dates
- Paper submission:
31 August 20083 September 2008 (updated) - Submission date for Hons/Ugrad students: 17 September 2008*
- Notification of acceptance: 6 October 2008
- Camera-ready copy: 19 October 2008
- Workshop: 8-10 December 2008
* 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. Send an email to the organisers with title, authors, and abstract.
Workshop Co-Chairs
- David Powers (Flinders University)
- Nicola Stokes (University College Dublin)
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:
