ALTA 2017 Last Call for Participation: Register online by 4th Nov, 2017

[Stephen Wan]

        AUSTRALASIAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP (ALTA 2017)

                                              Last Call for Participation

       *** For planning purposes, please register online by the 4th of Nov., 2017 ***

                                   *** https://www.trybooking.com/SRGP ***

Tutorials: 6th December, 2017

Main Conference: 7th-8th December, 2017

Location: QUT, Brisbane, Queensland

ALTA 2017 website: http://alta2017.alta.asn.au

Registration open now: https://www.trybooking.com/SRGP

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# Overview

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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.  

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# Technical Programme Overview

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The session titles are:

- Machine Learning and Applications

- Translation and Low Resource Languages

- Computational Linguistics and Information Extraction

- ALTA 2017 Shared Task

For more details on the papers, please see: http://alta2017.alta.asn.au/accepted_papers.html

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# Invited Speakers

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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.

Abstract:

Understanding the nature of influence and information propagation in social networks is of clear societal importance, as they form the basis for phenomena like "echo chambers" and "emotional contagion". However, these concepts remain surprisingly ill-defined. In studies of large online social networks, proxies for influence and information are routinely employed, leading to confusion as to whether the phenomena they underlie actually exist. In this talk I will demonstrate how online social media streams can be used as proxies for population-level health characteristics such as obesity and happiness, and introduce information-theoretic tools for constructing social networks from underlying information flows between individuals. I will present results relating individual predictability to popularity and contact volume, and introduce a paradigmatic mathematical model of information flow over social networks.

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.

Abstract:

The last few years have seen a tremendous surge in commercial interest in Artificial Intelligence, and with it, a widespread recognition that technologies based on Natural Language Processing can support valuable commercial applications. In this talk, I'll aim to give a comprehensive picture of the commercial NLP landscape, focussing on what I see as the key categories of activity: [1] virtual assistants, including chatbots; [2] text analytics and text mining technologies; [3] machine translation; [4] natural language generation; and [5] text correction technologies. In each case my goal is to sketch the history of work in the area, to identify the major players, and to give a realistic appraisal of the state of the art.

Note that the programme allows for ALTA participants to attend the ADCS 2017 Keynotes as well.

ADCS Keynote 1:  Dan Russell, Google.  "What do you really need to know? Learning and knowing in the age of the Internet"

ADCS Keynote 2: Victor Kovalev, Redbubble. "Solving hard problems at massive scale – applied data science research approach at Redbubble"

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# Tutorials

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Time and Date: 6th of December, 1pm

Tutorial Presentation: Ben Hachey

Tutorial Development: Ben Hachey, Will Radford, Bo Han

Title: Active Learning… and Beyond! 

Abstract:

This half-day session will take participants through situations they might face applying Natural Language Processing to real-world problems. We’ll choose a canonical task (text classification) and focus on the main issue that faces practitioners in green fields projects - where does the data come from? Our aim is to equip participants with the theoretical background and practical skills to quickly build high-quality text classification models.

Part 1: From Zero to Hero

Background: Text categorisation, annotation and crowdsourcing, reliability

Active learning: Selectively sampling informative examples for efficient annotation

Data programming: Starting with zero labelled examples

Part 2: Live Shared Task

Setup: Introducing the task and the challenge

Hack and label: Build a classifier from scratch in 60 minutes

Part 3: Wild Blue Yonder

Report: System descriptions and scoring

Other challenges and approaches: Labelling by description, interactive learning, deployment and monitoring, etc.