Sixth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL)
Co-located with DHASA 2025
https://sadilar.org/rail-2025/
RAIL Workshop date: 10 November 2025
DHASA Conference dates: 10-14 November 2025
Venue: CSIR International Convention Centre
DHASA website: https://digitalhumanities.org.za/
The sixth Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop will be co-located with the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA) 2025 conference at the CSIR International Convention Centre in Pretoria, South Africa, on 10 November 2025. The RAIL workshop is an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on African indigenous languages resources such as natural languages processing (NLP) tools, Human Language Technologies (HLT), data collections, and annotations. This workshop aims to foster a scientific community of practice that focuses on computational linguistic tools and data that are designed for or applied to the indigenous languages of Africa.
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 Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for discussions on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 has “Language resources in the age of large language models” as its theme, 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
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 (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ feedback can be incorporated.
All submissions should adhere to the ACL Style Guide. The guideline can be found under Style Files. Please note that although we follow the ACL guidelines, the page limit for DHASA submissions differs from what is specified in those guidelines. Templates are available for Microsoft Word, Overleaf or LaTeX. Submissions should be submitted in PDF format. Submissions that do not adhere to the prescribed style guide will be rejected.
A Limitations section is compulsory and should be placed at the end of the submission, before the references. The Limitations section (along with, optionally, a section for Ethical Considerations) may be up to one page and will not count toward the final page limit.
The peer review process is fully open. This means that the reviewers will see your name, and you will be able to see the reviewers’ names. This also means that you do not need to anonymise your submission. Please submit papers in PDF format only. Accepted papers that are presented at the conference will be published in the DHASA Journal (JDHASA).
The submission of contributions will be done through the ConfTool Conference Administration system, and can be accessed here: https://www.conftool.pro/dhasa2025
To submit your article, follow these steps:
1. Please register here: https://www.conftool.pro/dhasa2025
2. Once registered, click on Your Submissions to submit a new contribution.
3. Select and click on the RAIL Full Papers type to continue.
4. Add the following information:
– Information on all the authors
– Contribution details, including the title (Note that the list of topics is used for the DHASA conference and will not be used for the RAIL workshop; you can select anything here.)
– Up to five keywords, and
– An indication of whether students are submitting the contribution.
5. Upload your file and submit, or save your submission and return at a later stage to upload your file.
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: 14 July 2025 28 July 2025
Date of notification: 16 September 2025
Camera ready copy deadline: 24 October 2025
Workshop: 10 November 2025
DHASA conference: 10 November 2025 – 14 November 2025
Organising Committee
Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa
Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), South Africa
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