ALTA 2018 - 16th Annual Workshop of the Australian Language Technology Association

The 16th Annual Workshop of the Australian Language Technology Association will be held on 10th to 12th of December at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, co-located with the Australian Document Computing Symposium 2018.
The ALTA 2018 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 and a shared task that encourages promising students to get involved in language technology research.
ALTA 2018 website: http://alta2018.alta.asn.au
#Key Dates
Submission Deadline: 15th October, 2018
Author Notification: 9th November, 2018
Camera-Ready Deadline: 16th November, 2018
Registration closes 16th November
Tutorials: 10th December, 2018
Main Conference: 11th-12th December, 2018
#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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing.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 invite 1-2 page presentation abstracts. Submissions should include presentation title and abstract, name of the presenter, any publications relating to the work, and any information on existing or planned collaboration (e.g. visits or joint publications) with the local ALTA community. Abstracts 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.
# 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 Co-chairs
Xiuzhen(Jenny) Zhang, RMIT University
Mac Kim, CSIRO Data61
Publication Chairs
Mac Kim, CSIRO Data61
Xiuzhen(Jenny) Zhang, RMIT University