First call for papers Sixth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) Co-located with DHASA 2025 https://sadilar.org/rail-2025/

RAIL Workshop date: 10 November 2025 DHASA Conference dates: 10-14 November 2025 Venue: CSIR International Convention Centre. The sixth RAIL workshop website: https://sadilar.org/rail-2025/ DHASA website: https://digitalhumanities.org.za/

The sixth Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop will be co-located with the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA) 2025 conference at the CSIR International Convention Centre in Pretoria, South Africa, on 10 November 2025. The RAIL workshop is an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on African indigenous languages resources such as natural languages processing (NLP) tools, Human Language Technologies (HLT), data collections, and annotations. This workshop aims to foster a scientific community of practice that focuses on computational linguistic tools and data that are designed for or applied to the indigenous languages of Africa.

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 Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for discussions on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 has “Language resources in the age of large language models” as its theme, 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

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 DHASA style sheet which is provided on the Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa website (https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/dhasa/about). 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 DHASA submission requirements.

Please submit papers in PDF format (the submission link will be available soon). Accepted papers will be published in proceedings linked to the DHASA conference.

Important dates:

Submission deadline: 14 July 2025 Date of notification: 16 September 2025 Camera ready copy deadline: 24 October 2025 Workshop: 10 November 2025 DHASA conference: 10 November 2025-14 November 2025

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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