Dear SIGUL Members,

the third SIGUL Newsletter is out. The SIGUL Newsletter intends to be a bi-weekly report on issues related to the topics of language resources and tools for less-resourced languages. Your feedback will be welcome.

Claudia Soria SIGUL Co-chair

SIGUL is the ELRA-ISCA Special Interest Group on Less-Resourced Languages

****************** *Access to Knowledge*

A 3-day international conference on "Sanskrit and Other Indian Languages Technology" (SOIL-Tech) (http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in/conf/soiltech1/index-en.jsp) took place at JNU (Delhi, India) on 15-17 Feb 2019.  The conference was the opportunity to release White Papers for each Indian scheduled languages. On this occasion, Georg Rehm (DFKI) gave an Invited Talk on the META-NET White Papers series, which can be obtained at: https://www.slideshare.net/georgrehm/the-preparation-impact-and-future-of-th...

*Calls for Papers*

- The 6th LTC Workshop on Less-Resourced Languages (LRL 2019), May 19, Poznan, Poland

In conjunction with LTC’19, the 9th Language and Technology Conference Endorsed by SIGUL, the ELRA-ISCA SIG on less-resourced languages (http://www.elra.info/en/sig/sigul/). The LRL Call for Papers is attached. *Paper submission deadline: 20 March 2019*

Invited speaker: Delyth Prys, Head of the Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University, Wales, UK

- The 4th Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP 2019),  August 1, 2019 in Florence, Italy. The workshop is collocated with ACL 2019.

Associated with the workshop will be a shared task on Arabic dialect identification: MADAR Shared Task: Arabic Fine-Grained Dialect Identification Workshop Paper Due Date: April 26, 2019

- Call for Abstracts, Papers & Participants

- Also within LTC 2019, a Workshop on “Turkic and other Agglutinative Languages as a Challenge for Language Industry” (TALC 2019)

- Workshop on Data for the wellbeing of most vulnerable https://sites.google.com/site/dataforvulnerable19/ June 11, 2019 in Munich, Germany * Submissions due: March 25 *

*Call for participation*

- The time schedule for the 17th International Conference on Minority Languages (ICML XVII) is now online. With over 150 participants already, flying in from all over the world, this edition will be (again) incredibly interesting! You can find the schedules and all other information on https://icml.eu/. The conference is taking place 22-24 May 2019 and you can combine it with LRL 2019 in Poznan the week before for a full immersion in minority and less-resourced languages!

*Upcoming events*

- The Endangered Languages Project is partnering with the Language Documentation Training Center (LDTC) to offer a FREE webinar series on language documentation, running from January 26 through March 16! Sign up using this form, and join the Facebook group to participate.

- The 6th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC6) will take place at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from February 28-March 3, 2019. This year’s theme is “Connecting Communities, Languages and Technology”. More than 500 attendees from around the world will come together to share their work documenting and revitalizing languages, especially through the use of technology. All materials and talks will be made available through the ICLDC website.

*Miscellaneous*

- What International Mother Language Day Means for Indian Languages While India's major languages have transitioned well to the digital realm, smaller local languages still have a long way to go. Read more at: https://thewire.in/tech/what-international-mother-language-day-means-for-ind...

- How Indigenous Millennials Are Using Tech to Save Their Dying Languages Decades of oppression and forced assimilation have led to the steep decline of Indigenous languages. Now tech-savvy young people are fighting to preserve their culture. Read more at: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/d3zpjx/how-indigenous-millennials-are...