[Corpora-List] Call for papers, please distribute

[Lori Levin]

                        Call for Papers

           Language Technologies for African Languages
              March 30 or 31 (to be determined), 2009
                         Athens, Greece

A workshop at the annual meeting of the European Association for
Computational Linguistics



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, 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
December 19, 2008 using the submission webpage that will be available
soon. 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: December 19, 2008
Notification of acceptance: January 30, 2009
Camera-ready papers due: February 13, 2009
Workshop: either March 30 or 31, 2009 (to be announced)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Lori Levin, Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University,
USA (Workshop Chair)

John Kiango, Director, Institute of Kiswahili Research, University of Dar
Es Salaam, Tanzania

Judith Klavans, University of Maryland, Institute for Advanced Computer
Studies, USA

Manuela Noske, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA

Guy De Pauw, University of Antwerp, Belgium, University of Nairobi,
co-organizer of aflat.org

Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, African Languages and Cultures, Ghent
University, Belgium, University of the Western Cape, South Africa,
co-organizer of aflat.org

Peter Waiganjo Wagacha, School of Computing and Informatics, University of
Nairobi, Kenya, co-organizer of aflat.org

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Akinbiyi Akinlabi, Rutgers University
Yiwola Awoyale, University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium
Moussa Bamba, University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium
Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University
Sonja Bosch, University of South Africa
Christopher Cieri, University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium
Robert Frederking, Carnegie Mellon University
Dafydd Gibbon, University of Bielefeld, Germany
Jeff Good, SUNY Buffalo
Mike Gasser, Indiana University
Gregory Iverson, University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Study of
Language
Stephen Larocca, US Army Research Lab
Michael Maxwell, University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Study of
Language
Jonathan Owens, University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Study of Language
Tristan Purvis, University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Study of Language
Antonia Schleicher, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Tanja Schultz, Karlsruhe University
Clare Voss, US Army Research Lab
Briony Williams, University of Wales, Bangor

CONTACTS

Lori Levin
Language Technologies Institute
Newell-Simon Hall, Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
USA
lsl at cs.cmu.edu



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