Co-located with LREC 2026
RAIL Workshop date: 12 May 2026
RAIL website: https://sadilar.org/en/seventh-workshop-on-resources-for-african-indigenous-languages-rail-2026/
LREC Conference dates: 11-16 May 2026
LREC website: https://www.elra.info/lrec2026/
Venue: Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca (Spain)
The Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop provides an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on resources such as data collections and annotations, Human Language Technologies (HLT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, and their applications, 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. The seventh Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop will be co-located with the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2026 in Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma, Mallorca (Spain).
Many African languages are under-resourced while only a few are considered to be somewhat better resourced. These languages often share interesting properties such as writing systems, making them different from most high-resourced languages. From a computational perspective, these languages lack enough corpora to undertake high level development of NLP and HLT tools, which in turn impedes the development of African languages in these areas. During previous workshops, it was noted that the problems and solutions presented were not only applicable to African languages but were also relevant to many other low-resource languages across the world. 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.
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 Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for discussions on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.
The workshop theme is “Creating resources for less-resourced African languages”, but submissions on any topic related to properties of African indigenous languages (including related 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
- Applications that make use of data collections of African indigenous languages
Submission requirements:
We invite papers on original, unpublished work related to the topics of the workshop. Submissions, presenting completed work, should adhere to the LREC conference requirements. These requirements are described in LREC’s authors kit: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/. The submission link for the RAIL workshop will be provided later.
Authors are encouraged to upload their datasets to the SADiLaR repository: https://repo.sadilar.org/. In case of difficulties uploading the datasets, please reach out to Benito Trollip (benito.trollip@nwu.ac.za).
Important dates:
Submission deadline: 16 February 2026 AoE
Date of notification: 11 March 2026 AoE
Camera ready copy deadline: 30 March 2026 AoE
Workshop: 12 May 2026
NB: Kindly note that there will be no deadline extension for the submission of papers. These
are hard deadlines.
Organising Committee
Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa
Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa
Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa
Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa