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

New: deadline and article submission type

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to reveal currently unknown or unpublished existing resources (corpora, NLP 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 for a long submission and up to four (4) pages of content 
for a short submission 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: 23 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     
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Professor in Digital Humanities
South African Centre for Digital Language Resources 
https://www.sadilar.org<https://www.sadilar.org/>
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