The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) at the North-West University (NWU) hosted a successful fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The annual workshop, which took place on 6 May 2023 as part of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2023), was organised by Rooweither Mabuya, Mmasibidi Setaka and Prof Menno van Zaanen from SADiLaR, and Don Mthobela from the CAM Foundation.

“The RAIL workshop was a great success and all our attendees were fully engaged throughout the full-day workshop,” says Rooweither, who co-chaired the event with Mmasibidi.

She says the annual workshop provides an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on African indigenous languages, particularly those languages that are under-resourced. “It brings together researchers interested in showcasing their research and provides an overview of the current availability of African indigenous language resources - including data collections as well as tools. It also allows for information sharing and discussions on improving the quality and availability of these resources.”

Many African indigenous languages currently have no or very limited resources available and are often structurally quite different from the more well-resourced languages, therefore requiring the development and use of specialised techniques.

Growing a scientific community

“By bringing together researchers from different fields - such as computational linguistics, sociolinguistics and language technology - to discuss the development of language resources for African indigenous languages, we hope to boost research in this fields,” says Mmasibidi.

“Ultimately, we aim to create the conditions for the emergence of a scientific community of practice that focuses on data and tools specifically designed for or applied to indigenous languages found in Africa.”

Both Rooweither and Mmasibidi, who are digital humanities researchers at SADiLaR in IsiZulu and Sesotho respectively, have been involved with the RAIL workshop since its inception in 2019.

They were fortunate to travel to Croatia and attend the EACL 2023 conference in person, thanks to travel grants that they received to present their papers at the conference.

The two researchers both presented papers on behalf of their co-authors at the RAIL workshop. Rooweither’s paper was titled “Unsupervised Cross-lingual Word Embedding Representation for English-isiZulu”, with Derwin T Ngomane, Vukosi Marivate and Jade Abbott as co-authors.

“Our paper received great feedback in comments and questions from the audience,” says Rooweither.

Mmasibidi was equally pleased with the response she received for the paper she presented, titled “Evaluating the Sesotho rule-based syllabification system on Sepedi and Setswana words”, with Johannes Sibeko as co-author.

The Proceedings of the Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023) are now available, and the SADiLaR team is looking forward to receiving submissions for the fifth instalment of RAIL, once the call for papers is out.

 SADiLaR’s fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) in Dubrovnik, Croatia, was a great success.