The fifth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) Colocated with LREC-COLING 2024 https://bit.ly/rail2024

Conference dates: 20-25 May 2024 Workshop date: 25 May 2024 Venue: Lingotto Conference Centre, Torino (Italy) The fifth RAIL workshop website: https://bit.ly/rail2024 LREC-COLING 2024 website: https://lrec-coling-2024.org/ Submission website: https://softconf.com/lrec-coling2024/rail2024/

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 Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for discussions on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 (https://lrec-coling-2024.org/authors-kit/), which is provided on the LREC-COLING 2024 website (https://lrec-coling-2024.org/). 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 (https://softconf.com/lrec-coling2024/rail2024/). 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

-- Prof Menno van Zaanen menno.vanzaanen@nwu.ac.za Professor in Digital Humanities South African Centre for Digital Language Resources https://www.sadilar.org ________________________________ NWU PRIVACY STATEMENT: http://www.nwu.ac.za/it/gov-man/disclaimer.html

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