# Overview

The 14th Annual Workshop of the Australian Language Technology Association (ALTA 2016) will be held on the 5th and 6th of December at Caulfield campus of Monash University, colocated with the Australian Document Computing Symposium.
The ALTA 2016 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 early-career researchers.

The workshop also features invited keynote speakers and panelists and a shared task that encourages promising students to get involved in language technology research.


# Format

We invite submissions of two different formats:


## 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We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of natural language processing.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 approx. 5 minute talk to advertise the poster. Both formats may include up to 2 pages of references additional to these page count requirements. Note that the review process is double-blind, and accordingly submitted papers should not include the author identity 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.


## 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 These will not be published in the proceedings, but simply reviewed by the ALTA executive committee to ensure that they are on topic, coherent and likely to be of interest to the ALTA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. Successful submissions will have a 15 or 30 minute slot for an oral presentation. Please nominate what length presentation you would prefer in your submission.

# 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; and
- domain-specific adaptation of natural language processing algorithms.

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.