Overview

This year the Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA) will be held at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia from Wednesday 4th of December till Friday 6th of December. This event will be the eleventh annual installment 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 meeting returns to Australia after a successful international event in Dunedin, New Zealand in 2012.

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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing, including, but not limited to: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 2013 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

Due to the generous support of our sponsors, ALTA will be offering travel support for students to attend and present at ALTA 2013. See the workshop website for details.

Invited speakers

We are pleased to announce that Bonnie Webber and Mark Steedman will give invited talks.

Further details on the invited talks.

Tutorials

We are pleased to announce that ALTA2013 will include pre-workshop tutorials on 4 December 2013.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: 22 September 2013 (23:59 GMT +10:00)
• Notification: Monday 28 October 2013
• Final camera-ready copy: Monday 4 November 2013
• ALTA Tutorial: Tuesday 4 December 2013
• ALTA Workshop: Thursday 5 December -- Friday 6 December 2013

Workshop co-chairs

• Sarvnaz Karimi (CSIRO)
• Karin Verspoor (NICTA)

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)
• Dominique Estival (University of Western Sydney)
• Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)
• Nitin Indurkhya (UNSW)
• Su Nam Kim (Monash University)
• Francois Lareau (Macquarie University)
• Andrew MacKinlay (NICTA VRL)
• David Martinez (NICTA VRL)
• Meladel Mistica (The Australian National University)
• Diego Molla (Macquarie University)
• Scott Nowson (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
• Cecile Paris (CSIRO)
• Luiz Augusto Pizzato (University of Sydney)
• Andrea Schalley (Griffith University)
• Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University)
• Hanna Suominen (NICTA)
• Stephen Wan (CSIRO)
• Ingrid Zukerman (Monash University)

Workshop local organisers

• We are pleased to be working with Laurianne Sitbon (Queensland University of Technology) from ADCS.

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).