Connectionists: 2nd CfP 4th workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) @ EACL

[Menno Van Zaanen]

Second call for papers

Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL)
https://bit.ly/rail2023


The 4th RAIL (Resources for African Indigenous* Languages) workshop
will be co-located with EACL 2023 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. 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. 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.

Previous workshops showed that the presented problems (and solutions)
are not only applicable to African languages. Many issues are also
relevant to other low-resource languages, such as different scripts and
properties like tone. As such, these languages share similar
challenges. This allows for researchers working on these languages with
such properties (including non-African languages) to learn from each
other, especially on issues pertaining to language resource
development.

The RAIL workshop has several aims. First, it brings together
researchers working 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Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished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 “Impact of impairments on language resources” 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
*: The term indigenous languages used in the RAIL workshop is intended
to refer to non-colonial languages (in this case those used in Africa).
In no way is this term used to cause any harm or discomfort to anyone.
Many of these languages were or are still marginalised, and the aim of
the workshop is to bring attention to the creation, curation, and
development of resources for these languages in Africa.

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 plus additional pages of references. The
final camera-ready version of accepted long papers are allowed one
additional page of content (so up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’
feedback can be incorporated.
Submissions need to use the EACL stylesheets. These can be found at
https://2023.eacl.org/calls/styles. Submission is electronic in PDF
through the START system (link will be provided once available).
Reviewing is double-blind, so make sure to anonymize your submission
(e.g., do not provide author names, affiliations, project names, etc.)
Limit the amount of self citations (anonymized citations should not be
used). Accepted papers will be published in the ACL workshop
proceedings.
Please make sure you also go through the responsible NLP checklist
(https://aclrollingreview.org/responsibleNLPresearch/). Also,
submissions should have a section titled “Limitations” (as described in
the stylesheets). Authors are also encouraged to include an explicit
ethics statement.
Important dates:
Submission deadline 13 February 2023
Date of notification 13 March 2023
Camera ready deadline 27 March 2023
RAIL workshop 5 or 6 May 2023

Organising Committee
Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Don Mthobela, Cam Foundation
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

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Prof Menno van Zaanen     menno.vanzaanen at nwu.ac.za
Professor in Digital Humanities
South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
https://www.sadilar.org
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