Connectionists: 2nd CfP First workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) @ LREC 2020

[Menno Van Zaanen]

Second call for papers
First workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) @
LREC 2020
http://bit.ly/sadilar_rail2020

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.

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, wwa 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


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