36.3814, Confs: 7th Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages at LREC 2026 (Spain)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3814. Thu Dec 11 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3814, Confs: 7th Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages at LREC 2026 (Spain)

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Date: 10-Dec-2025
From: Muzi Matfunjwa [muzi.matfunjwa at nwu.ac.za]
Subject: 7th Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages at LREC 2026


7th Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages at LREC
2026
Short Title: RAIL Workshop
Theme: Creating resources for less-resourced African languages

Date: 12-May-2026 - 12-May-2026
Location: Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Contact: Muzi Matfunjwa
Contact Email: Muzi.Matfunjwa at nwu.ac.za

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

Submission Deadline: 16-Feb-2026

The Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop
provides an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on
resources such as data collections and annotations, Human Language
Technologies (HLT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, and
their applications, 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. The seventh Resources
for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop will be co-located
with the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2026 in
Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma, Mallorca (Spain).
Many African languages are under-resourced while only a few are
considered to be somewhat better resourced. These languages often
share interesting properties such as writing systems, making them
different from most high-resourced languages. From a computational
perspective, these languages lack enough corpora to undertake high
level development of NLP and HLT tools, which in turn impedes the
development of African languages in these areas. During previous
workshops, it was noted that the problems and solutions presented were
not only applicable to African languages but were also relevant to
many other low-resource languages across the world. 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 theme is “Creating resources for less-resourced African
languages”, but submissions on any topic related to properties of
African indigenous languages (including related 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
 - Applications that make use of data collections of African
indigenous languages
Submission Requirements:
We invite papers on original, unpublished work related to the topics
of the workshop. Submissions, presenting completed work, should adhere
to the LREC conference requirements. These requirements are described
in LREC’s authors kit: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/. The
submission link for the RAIL workshop will be provided later.



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