Second call for papers

Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) https://bit.ly/rail2023

The 4th RAIL (Resources for African Indigenous* Languages) workshop will be co-located with EACL 2023 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The Resources for African Indigenous Languages (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.

Previous workshops showed that the presented problems (and solutions) are not only applicable to African languages. Many issues are also relevant to other low-resource languages, such as different scripts and properties like tone. As such, these languages share similar challenges. This allows for researchers working on these languages with such properties (including non-African languages) to learn from each other, especially on issues pertaining to language resource development.

The RAIL workshop has several aims. First, it brings together researchers working 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 Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for discussions on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 “Impact of impairments on language resources” 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 *: The term indigenous languages used in the RAIL workshop is intended to refer to non-colonial languages (in this case those used in Africa). In no way is this term used to cause any harm or discomfort to anyone. Many of these languages were or are still marginalised, and the aim of the workshop is to bring attention to the creation, curation, and development of resources for these languages in Africa.

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 (so up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ feedback can be incorporated. Submissions need to use the EACL stylesheets. These can be found at https://2023.eacl.org/calls/styles. Submission is electronic in PDF through the START system (link will be provided once available). Reviewing is double-blind, so make sure to anonymize your submission (e.g., do not provide author names, affiliations, project names, etc.) Limit the amount of self citations (anonymized citations should not be used). Accepted papers will be published in the ACL workshop proceedings. Please make sure you also go through the responsible NLP checklist (https://aclrollingreview.org/responsibleNLPresearch/). Also, submissions should have a section titled “Limitations” (as described in the stylesheets). Authors are also encouraged to include an explicit ethics statement. Important dates: Submission deadline 13 February 2023 Date of notification 13 March 2023 Camera ready deadline 27 March 2023 RAIL workshop 5 or 6 May 2023

Organising Committee Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa Don Mthobela, Cam Foundation 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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