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</style></head><body style='font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; '>Second call for papers<br>First workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) @ LREC 2020<br>http://bit.ly/sadilar_rail2020<br><br>The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) is organizing a workshop held at the LREC 2020 conference in the field of African Indigenous Language Resources. This workshop aims to bring together researchers who are interested in showcasing their research and thereby boosting the field of African indigenous languages. This provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art and emphasizes availability of African indigenous language resources, including both data and tools. Additionally, it allows for information sharing among researchers interested in African indigenous languages as well as starting discussions on improving the quality and availability of the resources. Many African indigenous languages currently have no or very limited resources available and, additionally, they are often structurally quite different from more well-resourced languages, requiring the development and use of specialized techniques. By bringing together researchers from different fields (e.g., (computational) linguistics, sociolinguistics, language technology) to discuss the development of language resources for African indigenous languages, we hope to boost research in this field.<br><br>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. It aims to create the conditions for the emergence of a scientific community of practice that focuses on data, as well as tools, specifically designed for or applied to indigenous languages found in Africa. With the UNESCO supported International Year of Indigenous Languages, there is currently much interest in indigenous languages. The Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues mentioned that "40 percent of the estimated 6,700 languages spoken around the world were in danger of disappearing" and the "languages represent complex systems of knowledge and communication and should be recognized as a strategic national resource for development, peace building and reconciliation." As such, the workshop falls within one of the hot topic areas of this year's conference: "Less Resourced and Endangered Languages".<br><br>Suggested topics include the following:<br>* Computational linguistics for African indigenous languages<br>* Descriptions of corpora or other data sets of African indigenous languages<br>* Building resources for (under resourced) African indigenous languages<br>* Developing and using African indigenous languages in the digital age<br>* Effectiveness of digital technologies for the development of African indigenous languages<br>* Revealing unknown or unpublished existing resources for African indigenous languages<br>* Developing desired resources for African indigenous languages<br>* Improving quality, availability and accessibility of African indigenous language resources<br><br>Identify, Describe and Share your Language Resources (LRs)!<br><br>Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.<br><br>As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.<br><br>Submission Guidelines<br><br>RAIL 2020 asks for full papers from 4 pages to 8 pages (plus more pages for references if needed) , which must strictly follow the LREC stylesheet (https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2020/authors-kit/) which will be available on the conference website. Papers must be submitted through START (https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/RAIL2020/) and will be peer-reviewed.<br><br>Important dates<br><br>Submission deadline: 16 February 2020<br>Date of notification: 13 March 2020<br>Camera ready copy deadline: 2 April 2020<br>Workshop at conference: Morning session, 16 May 2020<br><br>Organizing Committee<br><br>Rooweither Mabuya<br>Phathutshedzo Ramukhadi<br>Mmasibidi Setaka<br>Valencia Wagner<br>Menno van Zaanen<br>South African centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa<br><br>Programme committee<br><br>Richard Ajah, University of Uyo, Nigeria<br>Ayodele James Akinola, Chrisland University, Nigeria<br>Felix Ameka, Leiden University, the Netherlands<br>Sonja Bosch, University of South Africa, South Africa<br>Ibrahima Cissé, University of Humanities, Mali<br>Elias Malete, University of the Free State, South Africa<br>Fekede Menuta, Hawassa University, Ethiopia<br>Innocentia Mhlambi, Wits University, South Africa<br>Emmanuel Ngue Um, University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon<br>Guy de Pauw, Antwerp University and Textgain, Belgium<br>Sara Petrollino, Leiden University, the Netherlands<br>Pule Phindane, Central University of Technology, South Africa<br>Danie Prinsloo, University of Pretoria, South Africa<br>Justus Roux, Stellenbosch University, South Africa<br>Msindisi Sam, Rhodes University, South Africa<br>Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Ghent University, Belgium<br>Elsabé Taljard, University of Pretoria, South Africa<br><br><br/><div style='clear: both;'><html>
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