Call For Papers

The rise in ML community efforts on the African continent has led to a growing interest in Natural Language Processing, particularly for African languages which are typically low resource languages. This interest is manifesting in the form of national, regional, continental and even global collaborative efforts to build corpora, as well as the application of the aggregated corpora to various NLP tasks.

This workshop therefore has several aims;

• to showcase this work being done by the African NLP community and provide a platform to share this expertise with a global audience interested in NLP techniques for low resource languages

• to provide a platform for the groups involved with the various projects to meet, interact, share and forge closer collaboration

• to provide a platform for junior researchers to present papers, solutions, and begin interacting with the wider NLP community

• to present an opportunity for more experienced researchers to further publicize their work and inspire younger researchers through keynotes and invited talk

We encourage paper submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:

NLP Experiments for African Langauges

• Existing NLP techniques but applied to African Languages, but for which published results do not exist, and accompanying analysis
• NLP techniques developed or adapted specifically for African Languages

Datasets for NLP for African Languages

• Work that describes the release of a dataset for an African language

Geographic Diversity in NLP

• Highlight the effects of evaluating models only with English
• Show the lack of geographic diversity or highlight any problems that are caused as a result of a lack of geographic diversity

Techniques applicable to African Languages

• NLP techniques for low-resourced languages (Transfer learning, multi-lingual techniques, unsupervised techniques)
• NLP techniques for morphologically complex Languages
• NLP techniques to handle large amounts of code-switching

Challenges for NLP in African Languages

• Work that showcases the challenges of doing NLP for African languages

Instructions

Submission

We will accept problem statements and extended abstracts (up to 2 pages + references)

Each 2-page submission will be eligible for oral or poster presentation and may opt-in to be published in an arXiv proceedings.

Submission Format

Contributions should be blinded and submitted using the ICLR template via Easy Chair.

Important Dates

• Submissions deadline: February 14, 2020
• Notification: March 2, 2020
• Camera ready: March 31, 2020
• Workshop: April 26th, 2020