Call for Papers – ALTA 2020

Overview

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 18th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association will be held virtually from the 13th to the 15th of January 2021 while the ALTA 2020 proceedings will be published in December 2020.

The ALTA 2020 workshop is the key local forum for socialising research results in natural language processing and computational linguistics, with presentations and posters from students, industry, and academic researchers. Like previous years, we would also like to encourage submissions and participation from industry and government department researchers and developers.

Note that ALTA is listed in recently updated CORE 2020 Conference Rankings as Australasian B. See details from CORE Rankings Portal.

Key Dates

  • Submission Deadline: 2nd October, 2020 9th October, 2020
  • Author Notification: 6th November, 2020 13th November, 2020
  • Camera-Ready Deadline: 27th November, 2020
  • Tutorials: 13th January, 2021
  • Main Conference: 14th-15th January, 2021

Submission deadlines are UTC-11

Format

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

(1) 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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing.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 and short papers should be 3-4 pages. Accepted papers will either be delivered as an oral presentation or as a poster presentation. Both short and long papers may include up to 2 pages of references in addition to the 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 person 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.

(2) Abstract-based Presentations

To encourage broader participation and facilitate local socialisation of international results, we invite 1-2 page presentation abstracts. The organisers may offer the opportunity to give an oral presentation or a poster presentation. Submissions should include presentation title and abstract, name of the presenter, any publications relating to the work, and any information on collaboration 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.

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
  • search and information retrieval
  • domain-specific adaptation of natural language processing algorithms
  • 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 require 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.

Instructions for Authors

Paper Submission

Authors should submit their papers via Easychair.

There are 3 tracks in EasyChair this year:

  • ALTA 2020 (Long) – use this for long papers
  • ALTA 2020 (Short) – use this for short papers
  • ALTA 2020 (Abstracts) – use this for abstracts

Formatting Guidelines

Submissions must follow the two-column ACL format. We therefore strongly recommend you use LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word template.

Paper Length

  • Long papers should be 6-8 pages (with up to additional 2 pages for references)
  • Short papers should be 3-4 pages (with up to additional 2 pages for references)
  • Abstracts ideally should be a few paragraphs and no more than 2 pages (with up to additional 1 page for references)

Anonymisation

  • Short and long papers must be anonymised.
  • Abstracts are NOT to be anonymised and must include the author's/authors' affiliation