LINGUIST List 25.2869

Tue Jul 08 2014

Calls: Computational Linguistics/Australia

Editor for this issue: Anna White linguistlist.org>

Date: 08-Jul-2014
From: Gabriela Ferraro nicta.com.au>
Subject: Australasian Language Technology Workshop
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Full Title: Australasian Language Technology Workshop
Short Title: ALTA 2014

Date: 26-Nov-2014 - 28-Nov-2014
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Contact Person: Gabriela Ferraro
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >
Web Site: http://www.alta.asn.au/events/alta2014/

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

Call Deadline: 19-Nov-2014

Meeting Description:

Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA 2014)
http://www.alta.asn.au/events/alta2014/

This year the Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA) will be held at the RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, on Wednesday 26 - Friday 28 November. This event will be the twelfth annual installment of the ALTA.

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
- To increase visibility of LT research in Australasia and overseas

Invited Speakers:

We are very pleased to announce that Jennifer C. Lai. from IBM Research has accepted our invitation to present a keynote at ALTA 2014. We will provide additional details on the website in the near future.

Tutorials:

We are pleased to announce the following tutorials at ALTA 2014:

Presenter: Dr. Trevor Cohn
Title: Gaussian Processes for NLP

Short Description:

Gaussian Processes are a powerful Bayesian modelling framework, which holds considerable potential in language processing. The tutorial will present fundamentals of Gaussian Processes and survey several NLP tasks where GPs have been deployed successfully.

Presenter: Dr. Gholamreza Haffari
Title: Machine Learning Approaches for Dealing with Limited Bilingual Data in Statistical Machine Translation

Short Description:

High quality translation output in Statistical machine translation (SMT) is dependent on the availability of massive amounts of parallel text in the source and target language. There are a large number of languages that are considered ''low-density'', either because the population speaking the language is not very large, or even if millions of people speak the language, insufficient online resources are available in that language. This tutorial covers machine learning approaches for dealing with such situations in SMT where the amount of available bilingual data is limited.

For more information, please see:
http://www.alta.asn.au/events/alta2014/alta-2014-tutorials.html

Student Travel Support:

With the generous support of our sponsors, ALTA will be offering travel support for students to attend and present at ALTA 2014. We will provide details of this on the workshop website at a later date.

Sponsorship:

We are pleased to announce that we have already secured sponsorship for the workshop from the CSIRO.

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

ALTA Membership:

We invite anyone interested in language technology research and development to join ALTA by subscribing to the ALTA mailing list alta-announce+subscribegooglegroups.com

Call for Papers:

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

Submissions:

We welcome submissions on any topic that is of interest to the LT community, and particularly encourage submissions of practical LT applications and through multi-disciplinary research. We also especially encourage submissions from industry.

Submissions will be through EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=altw2014

All submissions should follow the ACL 2014 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. 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. Papers not conforming to these requirements will be rejected without review.

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).

Important Dates:

Please note that as ALTW 2014 happens earlier in the year than in previous years, there will be no extensions to the submission deadline, given this tight schedule.

Submission deadline: 19 September 2014(23:59 GMT +10:00)
Notification: 24 October 2014
Final camera-ready copy: 7 November 2014
ALTA Workshop: 26-28 November 2014

Committee:

Workshop co-chairs:

Gabriela Ferraro (NICTA)
Stephen Wan (CSIRO)

Local Organisers:

Lawrence Cavedon (RMIT)

We are pleased to be working with Falk Scholer (RMIT) to organise the co-located event: the Australian Document Computing Symposium.

Preliminary Program Committee (to be finalised):

François Lareau (Université de Montréal)
Wray Lindsay (Monash University)
Andrea Schalley (Griffith University)
Scott Nowson (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Anthony Nguyen (The Australian e-Health Research Centre)
Will Radford (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University)
Su Nam Kim (Monash University)
Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne)
Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)
Diego Molla (Macquarie University)
Cecile Paris (CSIRO)
Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Karin Verspoor (The University of Melbourne)
Sarvnaz Karimi (CSIRO)
Alistair Knott (University of Otago)
Lan Du (Macquarie University)
David Powers (Flinders University)
Nathalie Colineau (DSTO)
Ben Hachey (University of Sydney)

Enquiries:

The Australasian Language Technology Workshop is being organised by ALTA. For any comments, please contact (workshopalta.asn.au)


Page Updated: 08-Jul-2014