34.3781, Calls: The Fifth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language

Sat Dec 16 17:05:03 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3781. Sat Dec 16 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3781, Calls: The Fifth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language

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Date: 14-Dec-2023
From: Menno van Zaanen [menno.vanzaanen at nwu.ac.za]
Subject: The Fifth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language

Full Title: he fifth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous
Language
Short Title: RAIL

Date: 25-May-2024 - 25-May-2024
Location: Turin, Italy
Contact Person: Menno van Zaanen
Meeting Email: menno.vanzaanen at nwu.ac.za
Web Site: https://bit.ly/rail2024

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics;
General Linguistics; Language Documentation; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 16-Feb-2024

Meeting Description:

The fifth Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop
will be co-located with LREC-COLING 2024 in Lingotto Conference
Centre, Torino, Italy on 25 May 2024. The RAIL workshop is an
interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on resources (data
collections, tools, etc.) specifically targeted towards African
indigenous languages. In particular, it aims to create the conditions
for the emergence of a scientific community of practice that focuses
on data, as well as computational linguistic tools specifically
designed for or applied to indigenous languages found in Africa.

Call for Papers:

The fifth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL)
Colocated with LREC-COLING 2024
https://bit.ly/rail2024

The fifth Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop
will be co-located with LREC-COLING 2024 in Lingotto Conference
Centre, Torino, Italy on 25 May 2024. The RAIL workshop is an
interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on resources (data
collections, tools, etc.) specifically targeted towards African
indigenous languages. In particular, it aims to create the conditions
for the emergence of a scientific community of practice that focuses
on data, as well as computational linguistic tools specifically
designed for or applied to indigenous languages found in Africa.

Many African languages are under-resourced while only a few of them
are somewhat better resourced. These languages often share interesting
properties such as writing systems, or tone, making them different
from most high-resourced languages. From a computational perspective,
these languages lack enough corpora to undertake high level
development of Human Language Technologies (HLT) and Natural Language
Processing (NLP) tools, which in turn impedes the development of
African languages in these areas. During previous workshops, it has
become clear that the problems and solutions presented are not only
applicable to African languages but are also relevant to many other
low-resource languages. Because these languages share similar
challenges, this workshop provides researchers with opportunities to
work collaboratively on issues of language resource development and
learn from each other.

The RAIL workshop has several aims. First, the workshop brings
together researchers who work on African indigenous languages, forming
a community of practice for people working on indigenous languages.
Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished
existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting
in a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows
for discussions on novel, desired resources for future research in
this area. Third, it enhances sharing of knowledge on the development
of low-resource languages. Finally, it enables discussions on how to
improve the quality as well as availability of the resources.

The workshop has “Creating resources for less-resourced languages” as
its theme, but submissions on any topic related to properties of
African indigenous languages (including non-African languages) may be
accepted. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to) the
following:
* Digital representations of linguistic structures
* Descriptions of corpora or other data sets of African indigenous
languages
* Building resources for (under resourced) African indigenous
languages
* Developing and using African indigenous languages in the digital age
* Effectiveness of digital technologies for the development of African
indigenous languages
* Revealing unknown or unpublished existing resources for African
indigenous languages
* Developing desired resources for African indigenous languages
* Improving quality, availability and accessibility of African
indigenous language resources

Important dates:
Submission deadline: 16 February 2024
Date of notification: 15 March 2024
Camera ready deadline: 29 March 2024
RAIL workshop: 25 May 2024

Submission requirements:
We invite papers on original, unpublished work related to the topics
of the workshop. Submissions, presenting completed work, may consist
of up to eight (8) pages of content plus additional pages of
references.

Organising Committee
Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa

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