From Menno.VanZaanen at nwu.ac.za  Wed Jan 28 16:03:30 2026
From: Menno.VanZaanen at nwu.ac.za (Menno Van Zaanen)
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:03:30 +0000
Subject: [Afridig] Second CfP Seventh Workshop on Resources for African
 Indigenous Languages (RAIL)@LREC
Message-ID: <21cf4f9a56af1285202c804bbf2349e8165947f0.camel@nwu.ac.za>

Second Call for Papers

Seventh Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL)
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/
Submission link for the RAIL workshop:
https://softconf.com/lrec2026/RAIL2026/
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
should be double blind and each submission should be between four and
eight pages. Only oral papers should be submitted. The maximum number
of pages excludes a compulsory ethics statement, discussion on
limitations, and references and optional acknowledgements, as well as
data and code availability statements if applicable. Appendices or
supplementary material are allowed, but this information will not
necessarily be taken into account during the review process.

The submission link for the RAIL workshop:
https://softconf.com/lrec2026/RAIL2026/

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 at nwu.ac.za).


Important dates:

Submission deadline: 23 February 2026 AoE
Date of notification: 11 March 2026 AoE
Camera ready copy deadline: 30 March 2026 AoE
Workshop: 12 May 2026

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

--
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
________________________________
 NWU PRIVACY STATEMENT:
http://www.nwu.ac.za/it/gov-man/disclaimer.html

DISCLAIMER: This e-mail message and attachments thereto are intended solely for the recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorised review, use, disclosure, or distribution is prohibited. If you have received the e-mail by mistake, please contact the sender or reply e-mail and delete the e-mail and its attachments (where appropriate) from your system.
________________________________

