Call for Participation for the 7th RAIL WORKSHOP

RAIL workshop https://sadilar.org/en/seventh-workshop-on-resources-for-african-indigenous-... Co-located with LREC 2026 https://www.elra.info/lrec2026

RAIL workshop date: 12 May 2026 Conference venue: Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca (Spain)

Theme: Creating resources for less-resourced African languages

The seventh Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop will be co-located with the LREC 2026 conference in Palma, Mallorca (Spain), on 12 May 2026. The RAIL workshop is an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on African indigenous language resources such as natural language 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 Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for discussions on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 the sharing of knowledge regarding the development of low-resource languages. Finally, it enables discussions on how to improve the quality as well as the availability of the resources.

Organising Committee

Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources

-- 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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