AUSTRALASIAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP (ALTA 2013)
Eleventh Annual Meeting
http://www.alta.asn.au/events/alta2013/

Tutorials: 4 December 2013
Workshop: 5-6 December 2013
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

This year the Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA) will be
held at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Queensland,
Australia on Wednesday 4 December - Friday 6 December. This event will
be the eleventh annual instalment 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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research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.

----- INVITED SPEAKERS -----

We are very pleased to announce that we have two exciting speakers
from the University of Edinburgh (UK) lined up: Bonnie Webber and Mark
Steedman.

Mark's presentation is "The Future of Semantic Parser Induction".
Bonnie's presentation title is TBA.

----- TUTORIALS -----

We have two excellent tutorials lined up for December 4:

"Working with the HCS vLab"
Steve Cassidy (Macquarie University)
Dominique Estival (University of Western Sydney)

This interactive tutorial will introduce the Human Communication
Science Virtual Laboratory (http://hcsvlab.org.au/) and demonstrate
how Australian LT researchers can take advantage of the tools and
resources there.


"Applying Wikipedia as a machine-readable knowledge base"
David Milne (CSIRO)

This interactive tutorial will instruct participants on how to work
with Wikipeda, and how to use Wikipedia to augment and enhance other
textual information sources; to help to understand more about those
other documents.


For more information, please see
http://www.alta.asn.au/events/alta2013/alta-2013-tutorials.html

----- SUBMISSIONS -----

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.

Submissions will be through EasyChair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=alta2013

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.

----- 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. We
will provide details of this on the workshop website at a later date.

----- IMPORTANT DATES -----

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

------ COMMITTEE -----

Workshop co-chairs

Karin Verspoor (NICTA)
Sarvnaz Karimi (CSIRO)

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 organiser

We are pleased to be working with Laurianne Sitbon (Queensland
University of Technology) from ADCS to organise the co-located
workshops.

----- SPONSORSHIP -----

We are pleased to announce that we have already secured sponsorship
for the workshop from NICTA (National ICT Australia) and Google.

If you or your organisation are interested in sponsoring the ALTA
Workshop, please contact the workshop organisers for information.

----- 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@alta.asn.au).

----- ALTA Membership -----

We invite anyone interested in language technology research and
development in Australia and New Zealand to join ALTA by subscribing
to the ALTA mailing list. You will then receive periodic announcements
by the ALTA Executive Committee about forthcoming activities and
resources of the Association. For more information and to sign up,
please see http://www.alta.asn.au/mailing_lists/index.html or simply
send an email to (alta-announce+subscribe@googlegroups.com).