Important Dates

  • Submission deadline for short/long papers, presentation abstracts and industry demonstrations: 20 September 2024 (23:59 Anywhere On Earth UTC-12).
  • Author notification: 29 October 2024.
  • Camera-ready deadline: 12 November 2024 (23:59 Anywhere On Earth UTC-12).
  • Tutorial: 2 December 2024.
  • Main conference: 3 December and 4 December 2024.

Overview

The 22nd Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) will be held in a hybrid format at the Australian National University, Canberra, from 2 December to 4 December 2024.

The hybrid format gives participants a valuable opportunity to attend either in-person or online. Participants who are unable to travel for various reasons (health, caring requirements, visa status, costs, etc.) are offered an online channel. With a hybrid format, we aim to increase the accessibility of participating in research communities throughout the workshop.

The ALTA 2024 workshop is the key local forum for socialising research results in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL). It will feature presentations, posters, and demonstrations from students, industry, and academic researchers. Like previous years, we also encourage submissions and participation from industry and government researchers and developers.

Note that ALTA is listed in the CORE 2023 Conference Rankings as Australasian C. See details from the CORE Rankings Portal.

Topics

ALTA invites the submission of papers and presentations on all aspects of NLP and CL, including, but not limited to:

  • Commonsense Reasoning.
  • Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics.
  • Dialogue and Interactive Systems.
  • Discourse and Pragmatics.
  • Efficient Methods for NLP.
  • Ethics in NLP.
  • Information Extraction.
  • Information Retrieval and Text Mining.
  • Interpretability, Interactivity and Analysis of Models for NLP.
  • Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond.
  • Language Modeling and Analysis of Language Models.
  • Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics.
  • Machine Learning for NLP.
  • Machine Translation.
  • Multilinguality and Linguistic Diversity.
  • Natural Language Generation.
  • NLP Applications.
  • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation.
  • Question Answering.
  • Resources and Evaluation.
  • Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Document Level, Textual Inference, etc.
  • Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining.
  • Speech and Multimodality.
  • Summarisation.
  • Syntax, Parsing and their Applications.

We particularly encourage submissions that broaden the scope of our community by considering practical applications of language technology and multidisciplinary research. We also specifically encourage submissions from the industry.

Format

We invite submissions of three different formats: (1) Original Research Papers, (2) Abstract-based Presentations, and (3) Industry Demonstrations.

(1) Original Research Papers

We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of NLP and CL.

Long papers should be 7-8 pages, and short papers should be 3-4 pages (see further details below). Accepted papers will either be delivered as an oral presentation or as a poster presentation. We only accept poster presentations for participants who are presenting on-site. In addition to the page count requirements, both short and long papers may include unlimited pages of references.

Note that the review process is double-blind, and accordingly, submitted papers should not include the identity of the 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, properly anonymising public repositories, 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 or poster presentation. We only accept poster presentations for participants who are presenting on-site. Submissions should include the presentation title and abstract, the 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 of 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 that may not have been published.

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.

(3) Industry Demonstrations

To encourage industry participation and networking opportunities, we are thrilled to announce a track for industry demonstrations, which provides an exciting opportunity for industry researchers to showcase their NLP applications. You should submit a proposal that is 1-2 pages long, containing (1) a description of the software, tools or applications that will be presented and how NLP techniques are used to address a specific problem and (2) a brief introduction of your organisation. The proposals will be reviewed by the ALTA executive committee to select demonstrations that best align with the interests of the ALTA community.

Multiple Submission Policy

Original research papers 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 has been submitted to another venue and identify the venue. Should your paper be accepted to ALTA and another venue, we will allow you to decide whether the paper should be published in the ALTA proceedings or treated as a presentation (without archival publication). In this case, you can still 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 OpenReview using the ‘‘ALTA 2024 Workshop Submission’’ button.

Formatting Guidelines

Submissions must follow the two-column ACL format. We therefore strongly recommend you use LaTeX style files or the Microsoft Word template from https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files.

Paper Length

  • Long papers:
    • 7-8 pages of content.
    • Plus, unlimited pages of references and appendices.
  • Short papers:
    • 3-4 pages.
    • Plus, unlimited pages of references and appendices.
  • About the appendices: While the appendix length is unlimited, it is essential to notify the authors that reviewers are not required to read it. The main text should be self-explanatory, with the appendix used only to highlight additional details.
  • Abstracts ideally should be a few paragraphs and no more than two (2) pages.
  • Industry demonstration proposals should be 1-2 pages.

Anonymisation

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