AfLaT - African Language Technology

Martin Benjamin (Kamusi Project International) is looking for volunteers to develop locales for African languages.

The World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL-6) takes place between the August 17th and the 21st 2009 at the University of Cologne, Germany.

There are two sessions on language technology, featuring the following talks:

On 31 March 2009 the First Workshop on Language Technologies for African Languages (AfLaT 2009) was organized, prior to the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-09). The workshop consisted of an invited talk on African language families and their structural properties by Prof. Sonja Bosch (UNISA, South Africa), followed by refereed research papers in computational linguistics.

The call for papers specified that the focus would be on the less-commonly studied and lesser-resourced languages of sub-Saharan Africa. The call was well answered, with 24 proposals being submitted. Following a rigorous review process, sixteen were withheld and were presented at the workshop. We were very pleased to see so much interest from the scientific community for this exciting and quickly developing field of research and can look back at a successful and productive workshop. On these pages you will find an overview of the presentations.

We would like to thank the US Army RDECOM International Technology Center - Atlantic for generously sponsoring this workshop.

We hope to see you again at AfLaT 2010!