[Afridig] Call for Participation for the 7th RAIL WORKSHOP

[Menno Van Zaanen]

Call for Participation for the 7th RAIL WORKSHOP

RAIL workshop
https://sadilar.org/en/seventh-workshop-on-resources-for-african-indigenous-languages-rail-2026/
Co-located with LREC 2026 https://www.elra.info/lrec2026

RAIL workshop date: 12 May 2026
Conference venue: Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca
(Spain)

Theme: Creating resources for less-resourced African languages

The seventh Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop
will be co-located with the LREC 2026 conference in Palma, Mallorca
(Spain), on 12 May 2026. The RAIL workshop is an interdisciplinary
platform for researchers working on African indigenous language
resources such as natural language 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Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished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 the sharing of knowledge regarding the
development of low-resource languages. Finally, it enables discussions
on how to improve the quality as well as the availability of the
resources.



Organising Committee

Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources

--
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
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