Programme – ALTA 2019

ALTA long papers are 20 minutes and short papers are 12 minutes. ADCS papers (at shared sessions) are 25 minutes for long papers and 15 minutes for short papers.

4th December (Wednesday) Tutorial Day

The tutorial will be in room CB11.B2.102 – In UTS Building 11 on level B2

Tutorial attendees are encouraged to fill out this feedback form after the tutorial.

There is a Sydney NLP Meetup event showcasing some previews of ALTA talks on Wednesday evening which ALTA participants are encouraged to attend if they want to join a fun social event with members of the NLP community in Sydney (or cannot attend all of the talks at the conference itself).

5th December (Thursday) Day 1

The ALTA sessions and shared sessions will be in room CB11.00.405 – In UTS Building 11 on the ground floor. The concurrent ADCS sessions will be close by in CB11.00.401

  • 8:15 Registration
  • 9:00 Opening Talk
  • 9:15 ALTA Keynote – Nicholas Evans with Ben Foley: New wings for the Library of Babel: The transcription challenge for the world’s 7000+ languages (Session Chair: Tim Baldwin)
  • 10:15 Morning Tea

  • 10:45 Session 1 – Linguistic Diversity in NLP (Session Chair: Mark Dras)

    • Towards a Robust Morphological Analyser for Kunwinjku. William Lane and Steven Bird
    • From Shakespeare to Li-Bai: Adapting a Sonnet Model to Chinese Poetry. Zhuohan Xie, Jey Han Lau AND Trevor Cohn
    • Readability of Twitter Tweets for Second Language Learners. Patrick Jacob and Alexandra Uitdenbogerd
    • A Neural joint model for Vietnamese word segmentation, POS tagging and dependency parsing. Dat Quoc Nguyen
    • Modelling Tibetan Morphology. Qianji Di, Ekaterina Vylomova and Tim Baldwin
  • 12:15 Lunch
  • 13:15 ADCS Keynote – Wilson Wong: Findability and discoverability in learning and employment

  • 14:15 Session 2 – Language Use and Applications (ADCS Shared Session)

    • Differences in language use: Insights from job and talent search. Bahar Salehi, Borhan Kazimipour and Timothy Baldwin
    • Character profiling in low-resource language documents. Tak-Sum Wong and John Lee
    • Towards a model for spoken conversational search. Johanne R. Trippas, Damiano Spina, Paul Thomas, Mark Sanderson, Hideo Joho and Lawrence Cavedon
    • A multi-constraint hinge loss for named-entity recognition. Hanieh Poostchi and Massimo Piccardi
  • 15:30 Afternoon Tea

  • 16:00 Session 3 – Application and Evaluation (Session Chairs: Andy MacKinlay and Massimo Piccardi)

    • Grounding learning of modifier dynamics: an application to color naming. Xudong Han, Philip Shultz and Trevor Cohn
    • Red-faced ROUGE: Examining the Suitability of ROUGE for Opinion Summary Evaluation. Wenyi Tay, Aditya Joshi, Xiuzhen Zhang, Sarvnaz Karimi and Stephen Wan
    • Feature-guided Neural Model Training for Supervised Document Representation Learning Aili Shen, Bahar Salehi, Jianzhong Qi and Timothy Baldwin
    • Modeling Political Framing Across Policy Issues and Contexts. Shima Khanehzar, Andrew Turpin and Gosia Mikolajczak
    • Box Embeddings for Inferring Predicate Entailment. Ian Wood, Mark Johnson, Stephen Wan, Javad Housseini and Mark Steedman
  • 17:25 End of Academic Program for Day 1
  • 19:00 ALTA/ADCS Dinner – The Eight Chinese Restaurant, 9-13 Hay St, Haymarket. Attendees who are early for dinner may wish to meet at The Mountbatten Hotel beforehand (Drinks at either venue must be paid for by attendees).

6th December (Friday) Day 2

The ALTA sessions and shared sessions will be in room CB11.00.405 – In UTS Building 11 on the ground floor. The concurrent ADCS sessions will be close by in CB11.00.401

  • 9:00 ALTA Keynote – Mark Johnson: Building new kinds of Natural Language Understanding and Conversational AI with Deep Learning (Session Chair: Diego Molla Aliod)
  • 10:00 Morning Tea And Poster Session

  • 11:00 Session 4 – Parsing and Sequential Modelling (Session Chair: Trevor Cohn)

    • Improved Document Modelling with a Neural Discourse Parser. Fajri Koto, Jey Han Lau and Timothy Baldwin
    • Does an LSTM forget more than a CNN?. Gaurav Arora, Afshin Rahimi and Timothy Baldwin
    • Domain Adaptation for Low-Resource Neural Semantic Parsing. Alvin Kennardi, Gabriela Ferraro and Qing Wang
    • A Pointer Network Architecture for Context Dependent Semantic Parsing. Xuanli He, Quan Tran and Gholamreza Haffari
  • 12:05 Lunch
  • 13:00 ADCS Keynote

  • 14:00 Session 5 – Science and Medicine (Shared ADCS Session, Session Chair: Sarvnaz Karimi)

    • Detecting Chemical Reactions in Patents. Hiyori Yoshikawa, Dat Quoc Nguyen, Zenan Zhai, Christian Druckenbrodt, Camilo Thorne, Saber A. Akhondi, Timothy Baldwin and Karin Verspoor
    • Identifying Patients with Pain in Emergency Departments Using Conventional Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Thanh Vu, Anthony Nguyen, Nathan Brown and James Hughes
    • Learning inter-sentence, disorder-centric, biomedical relationships from medical literature. Anton van der Vegt, Guido Zuccon, Bevan Koopman
  • 15:05 Afternoon Tea
  • 15:30 General Meeting
  • 16:00 Session 6 – Shared Task, Best Paper and Closing
  • 16:45 End of Conference