*About the Workshop*

/Africa has over 2000 languages and yet these are the least represented in NLP research. /
The rise in ML community efforts on the African continent has led to a growing interest in Natural Language Processing, particularly for African languages which are typically low-resourced languages. This interest is manifesting in the form of national, regional, continental and even global collaborative efforts to build corpora, as well as the application of the aggregated corpora to various NLP tasks.

This workshop therefore has several aims:

* to showcase work being done by the African NLP community and provide a
platform to share this expertise with a global audience interested in NLP
techniques for low-resource languages
* to promote multidisciplinarity within the African NLP community with the
goal of creating a holistic participatory NLP community that will produce
NLP research and technologies that value fairness, ethics, decolonial
theory, and data sovereignty
* to provide a platform for the groups involved with the various projects to
meet, interact, share and forge closer collaboration
* to provide a platform for junior researchers to present papers, solutions,
and begin interacting with the wider NLP community
* to present an opportunity for more experienced researchers to further
publicize their work and inspire younger researchers through keynotes and
invited talks

This workshop follows the previous successful edition in 2020 co-located with ICLR.
It will be taking place /ONLINE in co-location with EACL 2021/.

*Topics*
Topics will include, but are not limited to:

* Analyses of African languages by means of computational linguistics
* Empirical studies reporting result from applying or adapting NLP developed
for high-resource languages to African languages
* New model architectures tailored for African languages
* Using NLP techniques on African datasets
* Methods addressing out-of-domain generalization for NLP tasks with
training data in very limited domains
* Transfer learning between African languages or from higher-resourced to
lower-resourced languages
* Challenges or solutions for resource gathering for African NLP tasks
* Crowd-sourcing and open-sourcing software for African NLP
* Multidisciplinary research in African NLP
* Tutorials for African NLP for education or development purposes
* New resources for African NLP
* Development of NLP systems for African languages for production
* Socio-linguistic research for African languages
* Decolonization of NLP
* Ethical considerations for African NLP
* Reviews of research of African NLP

*Submissions*

We invite submissions of *long (up to 8 pages) and short (up to 4 pages) research papers, resource papers, position papers, tutorial/overview papers, and system design papers*. We grant unlimited space for appendix and author names, as well as we encourage shorter submissions.
We emphasize the reproducibility of empirical results and accessibility of resources in assessing the quality of submissions. In the interest of inspiring more scientific discourse in non-English languages, we invite researchers to include an abstract in their home language.

Submissions will be non-archival. Dual submissions are allowed as well but must be indicated. The review process will be double-blind, hence paper submissions must be anonymized.
Submissions will be accepted through the softconf platform and in PDF following the official EACL LaTeX template [1] (zip [2]):
https://www.softconf.com/eacl2021/AfricaNLP2021 [3]

*Important Dates*

Paper submission deadline: *February 5, 2021*
Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2021
Workshop date: April 19/20, 2021

*Support for Participants*

* /Mentorship/: We'll be providing short, transactional mentorship in a
one-on-one session with mentors to facilitate personalized feedback and
guidance for inexperienced paper writers. Please sign up through this form
[4].
* /Grants/: There will be a limited number of grants for sponsoring
registration and ACL membership fees for participants.

*Invited Speakers*

* Sabelo Mhlambi, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy / Bantucracy
* Melissa Omino, CIPIT Stathmore Law
* Kola Tubosun, The Brick House, NaijaNLP
* Ari Ramkilowan, Praekelt Consulting
* Sara Hooker, Google Brain
* David Adelani, Masakhane / Saarland University

*Organizers*

* Kathleen Siminyu, Neulab, CMU
* Julia Kreutzer, Google Research
* Hady Elsahar, Naver Labs Europe
* Vukosi Marivate, University of Pretoria
* Nishant Subramani, Independant
* Jade Abbott, Retro Rabbit
* Bernardt Duvenhage, Praekelt Consulting

*Contact*
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/africanlp-workshop [5]
E-mail: africanlp-workshop-org@googlegroups.com [6]

Read more: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/cfp-2nd-africanlp-workshop-eacl2021

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/eacl-2021-proceedings-template/jprrhhtnbrrm
[2] https://2021.eacl.org/downloads/eacl2021-templates.zip
[3] https://www.softconf.com/eacl2021/AfricaNLP2021
[4] https://forms.gle/qhKC7uaDFNT2Jotv5
[5] https://sites.google.com/view/africanlp-workshop
[6] mailto:africanlp-workshop-org@googlegroups.com