{"id":6598,"date":"2023-01-13T10:23:28","date_gmt":"2023-01-13T10:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/fourth-workshop-on-resources-for-african-indigenous-languages-rail-4\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T07:20:56","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T05:20:56","slug":"fourth-workshop-on-resources-for-african-indigenous-languages-rail-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/fourth-workshop-on-resources-for-african-indigenous-languages-rail-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"6598\" class=\"elementor elementor-6598\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-2685e82a elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"2685e82a\" data-element_type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-18ec656f\" data-id=\"18ec656f\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-3ee27797 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"3ee27797\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"googlefontscall\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"pagebuilderckparams\" data-colorpalettefromtemplate=\"\" data-colorpalettefromsettings=\",,,,\" data-styles=\"\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div id=\"row_ID1655106449753\" class=\"rowck ckstack3 ckstack2 ckstack1 uick-sortable\" style=\"position: relative;\" data-gutter=\"2%\" data-nb=\"1\">\n<style class=\"ckcolumnwidth\" wfd-invisible=\"true\">[data-gutter=\"2%\"][data-nb=\"1\"]:not(.ckadvancedlayout) [data-width=\"100\"] {width:100%;}[data-gutter=\"2%\"][data-nb=\"1\"].ckadvancedlayout [data-width=\"100\"] {width:100%;}<\/style>\n<div class=\"inner animate clearfix\">\n<div id=\"block_ID1655106449753\" class=\"blockck\" style=\"position: relative;\" data-real-width=\"100%\" data-width=\"100\">\n<div class=\"ckstyle\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"inner animate resizable\">\n<div class=\"innercontent uick-sortable\">\n<div id=\"ID1655106452579\" class=\"cktype\" style=\"position: relative;\" data-type=\"image\">\n<div class=\"tab_effects ckprops\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"tab_blocstyles ckprops\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"tab_image ckprops\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"ckstyle\">\n<style wfd-invisible=\"true\"><\/style>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"imageck\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/RAIL2023.gif\" width=\"\" height=\"\" data-src=\"images\/RAIL2023.gif\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ckstyle\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"row_ID1654770401883\" class=\"rowck ckstack3 ckstack2 ckstack1 uick-sortable\" style=\"position: relative;\" data-gutter=\"2%\" data-nb=\"1\">\n<style class=\"ckcolumnwidth\" wfd-invisible=\"true\">[data-gutter=\"2%\"][data-nb=\"1\"]:not(.ckadvancedlayout) [data-width=\"100\"] {width:100%;}[data-gutter=\"2%\"][data-nb=\"1\"].ckadvancedlayout [data-width=\"100\"] {width:100%;}<\/style>\n<div class=\"inner animate clearfix\">\n<div id=\"block_ID1654770401883\" class=\"blockck\" style=\"position: relative;\" data-real-width=\"100%\" data-width=\"100\">\n<div class=\"ckstyle\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"inner animate resizable\">\n<div class=\"innercontent uick-sortable\">\n<div id=\"ID1654770401900\" class=\"cktype\" style=\"position: relative;\" data-type=\"text\">\n<div class=\"ckstyle\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"cktext inner\" style=\"position: relative;\" spellcheck=\"false\">\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The workshop has \u201cImpact of impairments on language resources\u201d as its theme, but submissions on any topic related to properties of African indigenous languages may be accepted. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to) the following:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Digital representations of linguistic structures<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Descriptions of corpora or other data sets of African indigenous languages<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Building resources for (under resourced) African indigenous languages<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Developing and using African indigenous languages in the digital age<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Effectiveness of digital technologies for the development of African indigenous languages<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Revealing unknown or unpublished existing resources for African indigenous languages<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Developing desired resources for African indigenous languages<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Improving quality, availability and accessibility of African indigenous language resources<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">*: The term indigenous languages used in the RAIL workshop is intended to refer to non-colonial languages (in this case those used in Africa).&nbsp; In no way is this term used to cause any harm or discomfort to anyone.&nbsp; Many of these languages were or still are marginalised and the aim of the workshop is to bring attention to the creation, curation, and development of resources for these languages in Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><strong>Submission requirements:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2019 feedback can be incorporated.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Submissions need to use the EACL stylesheets. These can be found at <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/2023.eacl.org\/calls\/styles\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">https:\/\/2023.eacl.org\/calls\/styles<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Submission is electronic in PDF through the START system (<a href=\"https:\/\/softconf.com\/eacl2023\/RAIL2023\">https:\/\/softconf.com\/eacl2023\/RAIL2023<\/a>). 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Programme<\/strong><\/p>\n<table style=\"width: 796px;\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">8:30\u20139:00<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\"><em>Registration and opening remarks<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">9:00\u20139:25<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">IsiXhosa Intellectual Traditions Digital Archive: Digitizing isiXhosa texts from 1870\u20131914; <em>Jonathan Schoots, Amandla Ngwendu, Jacques De Wet and Sanjin Muftic<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">9:25\u20139:50<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Preparing the Vuk\u2019uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corpora; <em>Richard Lastrucci, Jenalea N. Rajab, Matimba Shingange, Daniel Njini and Vukosi Marivate<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">9:50\u201310:15<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Automatic Spell Checker and Correction for Under-represented Spoken Languages: Case Study on Wolof; <em>Thierno Ibrahima Ciss\u00e9 and Fatiha Sadat<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">10:15\u201310:55<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\"><em>Morning tea break<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">10:55\u201311:20<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">SpeechReporting Corpus: annotated corpora of West African traditional narratives; <em>Ekaterina Aplonova, Izabela Jordanoska, Timofey Arkhangelskiy and Tatiana Nikitina<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">11:20\u201311:45<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Analyzing political formation through historical isiXhosa text analysis: Using frequency analysis to examine emerging African Nationalism in South Africa; <em>Jonathan Schoots<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">11:45\u201312:05<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Unsupervised Cross-lingual Word Embedding Representation for English-isiZulu; <em>Derwin T. Ngomane, Vukosi Marivate, Jade Abbott and Rooweither Mabuya<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">12:05\u201312:30<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Investigating Sentiment-Bearing Words- and Emoji-based Distant Supervision Approaches for Sentiment Analysis; <em>Ronny Koena Mabokela, Mpho Roborife and Turguy Celik<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">12:30\u201314:00<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\"><em>Lunch break<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">14:00\u201314:25<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Towards a Swahili Universal Dependency Treebank: Leveraging the Annotations of the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili; <em>Kenneth M. Steimel, Sandra K\u00fcbler and Daniel Dakota<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">14:25\u201314:50<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Evaluating the Sesotho rule-based syllabification system on Sepedi and Setswana words; <em>Johannes Sibeko and Mmasibidi Setaka<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">14:50\u201315:15<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Deep learning and low-resource languages: How much data is enough? A case study of three linguistically distinct South African languages; <em>Roald Eiselen and Tanja Gaustad<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">15:15\u201315:40<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Comparing methods of orthographic conversion for B\u00e0s\u00e0\u00e1, a language of Cameroon; <em>Alexandra O\u2019Neil, Daniel G. Swanson, Robert Pugh, Francis Tyers and Emmanuel Ngue Um<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">15:40\u201316:20<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\"><em>Afternoon tea break<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">16:20\u201316:45<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Mini But Mighty: Efficient Multilingual Pretraining with Linguistically-Informed Data Selection; <em>Tol\u00fal\u1ecdp\u1eb9\u0301 \u00d2g\u00fanr\u1eb9\u0300m\u00ed, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher D. Manning<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">16:45\u201317:10<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Natural Language Processing in Ethiopian Languages: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities; <em>Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Abinew Ali Ayele, Moges Mehamed, Olga Kolesnikova and Seid Muhie Yimam<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">17:10\u201317:35<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">A Corpus-Based List of Frequently Used Words in Sesotho; <em>Johannes Sibeko and Orph\u00e9e De Clercq<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">17:35\u201318:00<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\">Vowels and the Igala Language Resources; <em>Mahmud Mohammed Momoh<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 87px;\">18:00\u201318:05<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 708px;\"><em>Closing remarks<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p><strong>Important dates:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Submission deadline <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">13 February 2023<strong> 20 February 2023<\/strong><br><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Date of notification <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">13 March 2023 (a little bit later due to missing reviews)<\/span><br><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Camera ready deadline <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">27 March 2023<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">RAIL workshop 6 May 2023<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><strong>Programme Committee<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ayodele James Akinola, Michigan Technological University, USA<br>Dimakatso Mathe, University of Limpopo, South Africa<br>Elsab\u00e9 Taljard, University of Pretoria, South Africa<br>Emmanuel Ngue Um, University of Yaound\u00e9 I, Cameroon<br>Febe de Wet, Stellenbosch University, South Africa<br>Friedel Wolff, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa<br>Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Ghent University, Belgium<br>Hussein Suleman, University of Cape Town, South Africa<br>Innocentia Mhlambi, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa<br>Johannes Sibeko, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa<br>Lorraine Shabangu, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa<br>Makanjuola Ogunleye, Virginia Tech, USA<br>Maria Keet, University of Cape Town, South Africa<br>Marissa Griesel, University of South Africa, South Africa<br>Mpho Raborife, University of Johannesburg, South Africa<br>Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa<br>Papi Lemeko, Central University of Technology, South Africa<br>Pule Phindane, Central University of Technology, South Africa<br>Richard Ajah, University of Uyo, Nigeria<br>Roald Eiselen, Centre for Text Technology, North-West University, South Africa<br>Sara Petrollino, Leiden University, the Netherlands<br>Sibonelo Dlamini, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa<br>Tanja Gaustad van Zaanen, Centre for Text Technology, North-West University, South Africa<br>Tunde Ope-Davies, University of Lagos, Nigeria<br>Valencia Wagner, Sol Plaatje University, South Africa<br>Vukosi Marivate, University of Pretoria, South Africa<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><strong>Organising Committee<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa<br>Don Mthobela, Cam Foundation<br>Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa<br>Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ckstyle\">Note that the RAIL workshop is part of a series of workshops. You can find information on the other workshops at <a href=\"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/rail\/\">https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/rail\/<\/a>.&nbsp;<\/div>\n<\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) 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, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":251,"featured_media":6597,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[730],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/251"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6598"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12168,"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6598\/revisions\/12168"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sadilar.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}