First call for papers
The fifth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL)
Colocated with LREC-COLING 2024

Conference dates: 20-25 May 2024
Workshop date: 25 May 2024
Venue: Lingotto Conference Centre, Torino (Italy)
The fifth RAIL workshop website: https://sadilar.org/index.php/en/2/427


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Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished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


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. The
final camera-ready version of accepted long papers are allowed one
additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ feedback
can be incorporated. Papers should be formatted according to the LREC-
COLING style sheet, which
is provided on the LREC-COLING 2024 website. Reviewing is double-blind, so make
sure to anonymise your submission (e.g., do not provide author names,
affiliations, project names, etc.) Limit the amount of self citations
(anonymised citations should not be used). The RAIL workshop follows
the LREC-COLING submission requirements.

Please submit papers in PDF format to the START account (the submission
link will be available soon). Accepted papers will be published in
proceedings linked to the LREC-COLING conference.


Important dates:

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


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