*** Please note the update to the key dates and the tutorial announced***

#Overview

The 15th Annual Workshop of the Australian Language Technology Association will be held on the 7th and 8th of December at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, co-located with the Australian Document Computing Symposium 2017.

The ALTA 2017 workshop is the key local forum for socialising research results in natural language processing and computational linguistics, with presentations and posters from student, industry, and academic researchers. This year, we would also like to encourage submissions and participation from industry and government department researchers and developers.

For this year's workshop, we are planning to feature invited keynote speakers, a special interest panel, and a shared task that encourages promising students to get involved in language technology research.

ALTA 2017 website: http://alta2017.alta.asn.au

#Key Dates

Submission Deadline: 7th October, 2017
Author Notification: 8th November, 2017
Camera-Ready Deadline: 15th November, 2017
Tutorials: 6th December, 2017
Main Conference: 7th-8th December, 2017

#Invited Speakers
We are pleased to announce our invited talks for ALTA 2017:

Title: Characterising information and happiness in online social activity
Speaker: Dr Lewis Mitchell
Position: Lecturer in Applied Mathematics
Affiliation: University of Adelaide

Biography:
Lewis’s research focusses on large-scale methods for extracting useful information from online social networks, and on mathematical techniques for inference and prediction using these data. He works on building tools for real-time estimation of social phenomena such as happiness from written text, and prediction of population-level events like disease outbreaks, elections, and civil unrest.

Title: Commercialised NLP: The State of the Art
Speaker: Dr Robert Dale
Position: Principal Consultant
Affiliation: Language Technology Group Pty Ltd

Biography:
Robert Dale runs the Language Technology Group, an independent consultancy providing unbiased advice to corporations and businesses on the selection and deployment of NLP technologies. Until recently, he was Chief Technology Officer of Arria NLG, where he led the development of a cloud-based natural language generation tool; prior to joining Arria in 2012, he held a chair in the Department of Computing at Macquarie University in Sydney, where he was Director of that university’s Centre for Language Technology. After receiving his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1989, he taught there for several years before moving to Sydney in 1994. He played a foundational role in building up the NLP community in Australia, and was editor in chief of the Computational Linguistics journal from 2003 to 2012. He writes a semi-regular column titled ‘Industry Watch’ for the Journal of Natural Language Engineering.

#Tutorials

We are very happy to announce the following tutorial:

Tutorial Presentation: Ben Hachey
Tutorial Development: Ben Hachey, Will Radford, Bo Han

Working Title: Active Learning… and Beyond! 🚀

Working Abstract:
This half-day session will take participants through situations they might face applying Natural Language Processing to real-world problems. We’ll choose a canonical task (text classification) and focus on the main issue that faces practitioners in green fields projects - where does the data come from? Our aim is to equip participants with the theoretical background and practical skills to quickly build high-quality text classification models.

#Format

We invite submissions of two different formats: (1) Original Research Papers and (2) Abstract-based Presentations

## Original Research Papers

We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing.

Long papers should be 6-8 pages. Accepted long papers will have a 15 minute slot for oral presentation plus 5 minutes for questions and discussion.
Short papers should be 3-4 pages. Accepted short papers will have a poster presentation plus a short approximately 5 minute talk to advertise the poster.
Both formats may include up to 2 pages of references in addition to these page count requirements.

Note that the review process is double-blind, and accordingly submitted papers should not include the identity of author(s) and the text should be suitably anonymised, e.g., using third person wording for self-citations, not providing URLs to your personal website, etc.

Original research papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, which will be published online in the ACL anthology and the ALTA website. Long papers will be distinguished from short papers in the proceedings.

## Abstract-based Presentations

To encourage broader participation and facilitate local socialisation of international results, we continue the presentations format introduced last year. We invite submissions of 1-2 page presentation abstracts. These will not be published in the proceedings, but simply reviewed by the ALTA executive committee to ensure that they are on topic, coherent and likely to be of interest to the ALTA community. Abstracts on work in progress and work published or submitted elsewhere are encouraged. ALTA invites submissions of all manner interesting research, not limited to, but including:

- established academics giving an overview of an exciting paper or paper/s published in international venues;
- completing research students giving an overview of their thesis work;
- early candidature research students presenting their work-in-progress and ideas, which may not have been published; and
- industry presenting research and development over linguistic data in the context of their business.

Presentation abstracts should not be anonymised, any publications relating to the work should be cited in the submission, and the person who will give the presentation should be clearly stated.

# Topics

ALTA invites the submission of papers and presentations 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; and
- applied natural language processing and/or applications in industry.

We particularly encourage submissions that broaden the scope of our community through the consideration of practical applications of language technology and through multi-disciplinary research. We also specifically encourage submissions from industry.

#Multiple Submission Policy

Original research papers that are under review for other publication venues or that you intend to submit elsewhere may be submitted in parallel to ALTA. We request that you declare at submission that your paper is submitted to another venue, and identify the venue. Should your paper be accepted to both ALTA and another venue, we allow you to decide whether the paper should be published in the ALTA proceedings, or if it should be treated as a Presentation (without archival publication). In this case you would still be able to present a research talk at the ALTA workshop. This is to encourage more internationally leading research to be presented at the workshop.

# Student Funding
As in previous years, ALTA will provide student travel support to attend the workshop. For more information, please see the ALTA Workshop website.

#Organisation

Workshop Chairs
Jojo Wong, Monash University
Stephen Wan, CSIRO Data61

Publication Chairs
Gholamreza Haffari, Monash University
Jojo Wong, Monash University