[Corpora-List] 2nd CFP - EACL Workshop Language Technologies for African Languages (Extended Deadline)

[Guy De Pauw]

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
In multilingual situations, language technologies are crucial for 
providing access to information and opportunities for economic 
development. With somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 different languages, 
Africa is a multilingual continent par excellence and presents acute 
challenges for those seeking to promote and use African languages in the 
areas of business development, education, research, and relief aid. In 
recent times a number of African researchers and institutions have come 
forward that share the common goal of developing capabilities in 
language technologies. This workshop provides a forum to meet and share 
the latest developments in this field. It also seeks to include 
linguists who specialize in African languages and would like to leverage 
the tools and approaches of computational linguistics, as well as 
computational linguists who are interested in learning about the 
particular linguistic challenges posed by African languages.

The workshop will consist of an invited tutorial on African language 
families and their structural properties by Prof. Sonja Bosch (UNISA, 
South Africa), followed by refereed research papers in computational 
linguistics. The focus will be on the less-commonly studied 
lesser-resourced languages, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa. These 
include languages from all four families, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, 
Khoisan and Afro-Asiatic with the exception of Arabic which is covered 
by the SIGSemitic workshops. The workshop will also not cover variants 
of European languages such as African French, African English or Afrikaans.

We invite submissions on any topic related to Language Technologies and 
African languages including, but not limited to, the following:
+ Corpora and corpus annotation,
+ Machine readable lexicons,
+ Morphological analyzers and spelling checkers,
+ Part of speech taggers and parsers,
+ Speech recognition and synthesis,
+ Applications such as machine translation, information extraction, 
information retrieval, computer-assisted language learning and question 
answering.

Other topics of interest are:
The role of language technologies in economic development, education, 
health care, and emergency and public services. Documentation of 
endangered languages and the use of language technologies to enhance 
language vitality, Language technologies delivered on mobile platforms, 
e.g. phones.

TRAVEL FUNDING
A very limited amount of travel funding is available. Preference will be 
given to authors of accepted research papers who are traveling from Africa.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work in the topic 
area of this workshop. Submissions should follow the two-column format 
of the EACL 2009 main-conference proceedings and should not exceed eight 
(8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of either 
the LaTeX style file or the Microsoft-Word Style file, which can be 
found at http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/authors.
The reviewing will be blind and the paper should therefore not include 
the authors' names and affiliations.
Submission will be electronic. Papers must be submitted no later than 
January 19, 2009 using the submission webpage:
https://www.softconf.com/eacl09/african/

Submissions will be reviewed by 3 members of the Program Committee. 
Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines on how to produce 
camera-ready versions of their papers for inclusion in the EACL workshop 
proceedings.
Notification of receipt will be emailed to the contact author.

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: January 19, 2009 (EXTENDED)
Notification of acceptance: February 2, 2009
Camera-ready papers due: February 13, 2009
Workshop: either March 30 or 31, 2009 (to be announced)

More information at http://aflat.org/workshop

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