LTAL 2009

Call for Papers

Language Technologies for African Languages

March 30 or 31 (to be determined), 2009

Athens, Greece

A workshop at the annual meeting of the European Association for Computational Linguistics

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

In multilingual situations, language technologies are crucial for providing access to information and opportunities for economic development. With somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 different languages, Africa is a multilingual continent par excellence and presents acute challenges for those seeking to promote and use African languages in the areas of business development, education, research, and relief aid. In recent times a number of African researchers and institutions have come forward that share the common goal of developing capabilities in language technologies. This workshop provides a forum to meet and share the latest developments in this field. It also seeks to include linguists who specialize in African languages and would like to leverage the tools and approaches of computational linguistics, as well as computational linguists who are interested in learning about the particular linguistic challenges posed by African languages.

The workshop will consist of an invited tutorial on African language families and their structural properties, followed by refereed research papers in computational linguistics. The focus will be on the less-commonly studied lesser-resourced languages, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa. These include languages from all four families, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan and Afro-Asiatic with the exception of Arabic which is covered by the SIGSemitic workshops. The workshop will also not cover variants of European languages such as African French, African English or Afrikaans.

We invite submissions on any topic related to Language Technologies and African languages including, but not limited to, the following:

-       Corpora and corpus annotation,

-       Machine readable lexicons,

-       Morphological analyzers and spelling checkers,

-       Part of speech taggers and parsers,

-       Speech recognition and synthesis,

-       Applications such as machine translation, information extraction, information retrieval, computer-assisted language learning and question answering.

Other topics of interest are:

-       The role of language technologies in economic development, education, health care, and emergency and public services.

-       Documentation of endangered languages and the use of language technologies to enhance language vitality,

-       Language technologies delivered on mobile platforms, e.g. phones.

TRAVEL FUNDING

A very limited amount of travel funding is available. Preference will be given to authors of accepted research papers who are traveling from Africa.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. Submissions should follow the two-column format of the EACL 2009 main-conference proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of either the LaTeX style file or the Microsoft-Word Style file, which can be found at http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/authors.

The reviewing will be blind and the paper should therefore not include the authors' names and affiliations.

Submission will be electronic. Papers must be submitted no later than December 19, 2008 using the submission webpage that will be available soon. Submissions will be reviewed by 3 members of the Program Committee. Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines on how to produce camera-ready versions of their papers for inclusion in the EACL workshop proceedings.

Notification of receipt will be emailed to the contact author.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: December 19, 2008 Notification of acceptance: January 30, 2009 Camera-ready papers due: February 13, 2009 Workshop: either March 30 or 31, 2009 (to be announced)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

* Lori Levin, Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA (Workshop Chair) * John Kiango, Director, Institute of Kiswahili Research, University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania * Judith Klavans, University of Maryland, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, USA * Manuela Noske, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA * Guy De Pauw, University of Antwerp, Belgium, University of Nairobi, co-organizer of aflat.org * Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University, Belgium, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, co-organizer of aflat.org * Peter Waiganjo Wagacha, School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, Kenya, co-organizer of aflat.org

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Akinbiyi Akinlabi, Rutgers University

Yiwola Awoyale, University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium

Moussa Bamba, University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium

Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University

Sonja Bosch, University of South Africa

Christopher Cieri, University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium

Robert Frederking, Carnegie Mellon University

Dafydd Gibbon, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Jeff Good, SUNY Buffalo

Mike Gasser, Indiana University

Gregory Iverson, University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Study of Language

Stephen Larocca, US Army Research Lab

Michael Maxwell, University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Study of Language

Jonathan Owens, University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Study of Language

Tristan Purvis, University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Study of Language

Antonia Schleicher, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Tanja Schultz, Karlsruhe University

Clare Voss, US Army Research Lab

Briony Williams, University of Wales, Bangor

CONTACTS

Lori Levin

Language Technologies Institute

Newell-Simon Hall, Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

USA

lsl@cs.cmu.edu This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP