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<div class="elementToProof"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The fifth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Colocated with LREC-COLING 2024</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">https://bit.ly/rail2024</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">New: deadline and article submission type</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Conference dates: 20-25 May 2024</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Workshop date: 25 May 2024</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Venue: Lingotto Conference Centre, Torino (Italy)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The fifth RAIL workshop website: https://bit.ly/rail2024</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">LREC-COLING 2024 website: https://lrec-coling-2024.org/</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Submission website: https://softconf.com/lrec-coling2024/rail2024/</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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:</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">* Digital representations of linguistic structures</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">* Descriptions of corpora or other data sets of African indigenous languages</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">* Building resources for (under resourced) African indigenous languages</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">* Developing and using African indigenous languages in the digital age</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">* Effectiveness of digital technologies for the development of African indigenous languages</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">* Revealing unknown or unpublished existing resources for African indigenous languages</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">* Developing desired resources for African indigenous languages</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">* Improving quality, availability and accessibility of African indigenous language resources</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Submission requirements:</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Important dates:</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Submission deadline: 23 February 2024</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Date of notification: 15 March 2024</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Camera ready deadline: 29 March 2024</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">RAIL workshop: 25 May 2024</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Organising Committee</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa</span></div>
<div class="elementToProof"><span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South
Africa</span></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: "Segoe UI", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 1.5;">Prof Menno van Zaanen </span><span style="font-family: "Segoe UI", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(0, 120, 212); line-height: 1.5;"><u><a href="mailto:menno.vanzaanen@nwu.ac.za" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 120, 212);">menno.vanzaanen@<wbr>nwu.ac.za</a></u></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Segoe UI", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 1.5;">Professor in Digital Humanities<br>
South African Centre for Digital Language Resources </span><span style="font-family: "Segoe UI", sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(0, 120, 212); line-height: 1.5;"><u><a href="https://www.sadilar.org/" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 120, 212);" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.sadilar.org/&source=gmail&ust=1655293034286000&usg=AOvVaw2uL9er8dPDagV-zNqRXte6">https://www.sadilar.<wbr>org</a></u></span></div>
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