Connectionists: 1st Call for Papers: First workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) @ LREC2020

[Menno Van Zaanen]

                        First call for papers
  First workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL)
                    http://bit.ly/sadilar_rail2020

The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) is
organizing a workshop 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.

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".

Suggested topics include the following:
* Computational linguistics for African indigenous languages
* 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

Identify, Describe and Share your Language Resources (LRs)!

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.


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.islrna 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.

Submission Guidelines

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.

Important dates

Submission deadline: 16 February 2020
Date of notification: 13 March 2020
Camera ready copy deadline: 2 April 2020
Workshop at conference: Morning session, 16 May 2020

Organizing Committee

Rooweither Mabuya
Phathutshedzo Ramukhadi
Mmasibidi Setaka
Valencia Wagner
Menno van Zaanen
South African centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South
Africa

Programme committee

Richard Ajah, University of Uyo, Nigeria
Ayodele James Akinola, Chrisland University, Nigeria
Felix Ameka, Leiden University, the Netherlands
Sonja Bosch, University of South Africa, South Africa
Ibrahima Cissé, University of Humanities, Mali
Elias Malete, University of the Free State, South Africa
Fekede Menuta, Hawassa University, Ethiopia
Innocentia Mhlambi, Wits University, South Africa
Emmanuel Ngue Um, University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon
Guy de Pauw, Antwerp University and Textgain, Belgium
Sara Petrollino, Leiden University, the Netherlands
Pule Phindane, Central University of Technology, South Africa
Danie Prinsloo, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Justus Roux, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Msindisi Sam, Rhodes University, South Africa
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Ghent University, Belgium
Elsabé Taljard, University of Pretoria, South Africa


Vrywaringsklousule / Disclaimer: 
http://www.nwu.ac.za/it/gov-man/disclaimer.html 

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