#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: 18th September, 2017
Author Notification: 20th October, 2017
Camera-Ready Deadline: 3rd 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.

#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.

#Organisation

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

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

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