Displaying items by tag: developing

Author: Mmasibidi Setaka (SADiLaR Sesotho Researcher)

The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) organised a workshop (originally expected to be held at the LREC 2020 conference in Marseille, France) in the field of African Indigenous Language Resources. This workshop aimed at bringing together researchers who are interested in showcasing their research and thereby boosting the field of African indigenous languages. It provided an overview of the current state-of-the-art and emphasises availability of African indigenous language resources, including both data and tools. Additionally, it allowed 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 specialised 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 hoped the workshop would boost research in this field.