We are happy to announce that this year’s workshop dealing with African Language Technology (AfLaT) will take place on Friday 6 December 2013, at Ghent University. This year’s workshop, the fifth in the series, is conceived differently from the earlier ones, in that we wish to broaden our activities by reaching out to all colleagues who have lexical resources for the African languages, and already work with those resources, but have not yet necessarily made the move to using advanced computational routines to speed up the analysis or the building of tools. In other words, are you a corpus linguist working on the African languages, and would you like to know how computational linguistics could further your work, then this workshop is for you. Or, do you have African language data (corpora), and would you like to know about the state-of-the-art software tools to annotate and search those data, then this workshop is for you. Of course, if you are already into computational linguistics for the African languages, then you are most welcome to present your latest research results.

This year’s workshop, then, is conceived as a MasterClass, led by the founding members of AfLaT: Guy De Pauw (U Antwerp), Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (U Ghent), and Peter Wagacha (U Nairobi). We welcome all researches currently working with African-language corpus data, inviting them to present their current data sets and/or research during max. 20 minutes, to be followed by a discussion and advice from those present for 10 min. Working languages are English and French.

To participate we will need a title for your talk, and a brief abstract only, to be sent to the local organiser, G-M de Schryver (details below), no later than 15 November 2013.

PRACTICAL MATTERS of AfLaT 2013
As we CO-LOCATE with the GAP Symposium, we ask all participants to register online at: https://www.gap.ugent.be/registration. The REGISTRATION FEE is symbolic, at just 10 EUR for BA and MA students, 20 EUR for PhD students, 50 EUR for all others, and includes the conference folder, teas and coffees during the breaks, as well as a light lunch. (Those who wish to present their paper as a poster during the GAP lunch are also welcome to do so in addition.)

For tips on TRAVEL to the venue, please see: https://www.gap.ugent.be/GAPSYM7_entravel
For tips on ACCOMMODATION, please see: https://www.gap.ugent.be/gapsym7_enaccommodation
For all further information, either contact the AfLaT organiser, and/or see: https://www.gap.ugent.be/gapsym7_eninfo

MORE INFO on AfLaT
WEBSITE: https://aflat.org
WORKSHOP SERIES
o 1st, AfLaT 2009: Athens, Greece (@ EACL 2009)
o 2nd, AfLaT 2010: Valletta, Malta (@ LREC 2010)
o 3rd, AfLaT 2011: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (@ AGIS 2011)
o 4th, AfLaT 2012: Istanbul, Turkey (@ LREC 2012)
o 5th, AfLat 2013: Ghent, Belgium (@ GAPSYM 2013)
SPECIAL ISSUE of the journal Language Resources & Evaluation on AFRICAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY: https://aflat.org/content/language-resources-evaluation-special-issue-african-language-technology

We hope to receive your submissions soon!

Gilles-Maurice de Schryver
KongoKing Research Group
Department of Languages and Cultures
Ghent University
Rozier 44
B-9000 Ghent (Belgium)
E-mail: gillesmaurice [dot] deschryver [at] ugent [dot] be

The 8th International Workshop of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology for Minority Languages (SALTMIL, https://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil) and the 4th Workshop on African Language Technology (AfLaT2012) will be held as a joint effort in Istanbul, in May 2012, as part of the 2012 International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2012). This workshop will take place on Tuesday, 22 May 2012 in the Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre, Istanbul, Turkey.

Papers are invited for the above full-day workshop, in the format outlined below. Most submitted papers will be presented in poster form, though some authors may be invited to present in lecture format.

The third International Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU’12) will be held near Cape Town, South Africa on 7-9 May 2012.

The workshop will focus on spoken language processing for under-resourced languages and aims at gathering researchers working on:

ASR, synthesis and translation for under-resourced languages
Portability issues
Multilingual spoken language processing
Fast resource acquisition (speech, text, lexicons, parallel corpora)
Applications of spoken language technologies for under-resourced languages
Other related topics

Original research papers in any of these areas are hereby invited – details are available at
https://www.mica.edu.vn/sltu2012/.
Previous Workshops on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages were held in 2008 at the Hanoi University of Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam (see https://www.mica.edu.vn/sltu2012/) and in 2010 at University Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang, Malaysia (https://www.mica.edu.vn/sltu2012/). SLTU’12 will continue the tradition of providing a forum for the presentation of research results related to under-resourced languages. For SLTU’12, the languages of Africa will receive particular attention, but papers on all under-resourced languages are invited.

Students are encouraged to participate in SLTU’12 – financial support for such participation is being sought, and will be announced on the workshop Web site.

Important dates :

Paper submission: 13 Jan 2012 27 Jan 2012
Notification of Paper Acceptance: 7 Feb 2012 21 Feb 2012
Camera ready papers due: 28 Feb 2012 14 Mar 2012
Author Registration Deadline: 28 Feb 2012 14 Mar 2012

After two successful workshops in Athens, Greece (EACL2009) and Malta (LREC2010), we are very pleased to announce that the 2011 edition of the AfLaT workshop will be held as a breakout session of the AGIS’11 conference (Action Week for Global Information Sharing). It marks the first time an AfLaT workshop is organized on the African continent, namely in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) on 1 and 2 December 2011.

The format will be a bit different from previous events. People interested in actively participating in AGIS’11 are asked to submit a proposal for a talk before 21 October 2011 (extended deadline) through the AGIS’11 website. This means that you will not need to submit a full paper before the conference. After the conference, we will send out a call for papers for an AGIS’11 or AfLaT2011-specific proceedings.

For the AfLaT2011 breakout session, we invite submissions on any topic related to language and speech technology 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
  
• The role of language technologies in economic development, education, healthcare, and emergency and public services
  
• Documentation of endangered languages and the use of language technologies to enhance language vitality
  
• The combination of language and speech technology with mobile phone technology.
  

We hope to see you in Addis in December and look forward to receiving the proposals of your talks.

More information on AGIS’11 can be found in the press release (see below) or at https://www.agis11.org.

For specific AfLaT2011 information, please consult AfLaT.org or contact us at aflat2011 [at] aflat [dot] org.

The Second workshop on African Language Technology (AfLaT 2010) will take place in the context of the LREC2010 conference in Valletta, Malta. The AfLaT workshop provides a forum for researchers in the field of African Language Technology to meet and share the latest developments in their field. The workshop will kick off with an invited speaker, followed by refereed research papers in human language technologies.

Date: Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Location: Valletta, Malta

Date: Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Location: Valletta, Malta

We are pleased to announce that the following papers have been accepted for the 2nd workshop on African Language Technology. We are greatly indebted to the members of the program committee who have done an amazing job reviewing the papers.

• An HLT profile of the official South African languages - Aditi Sharma Grover, Gerhard B. van Huyssteen and Marthinus W. Pretorius
  
• Corpus Building in a Predominantly Oral Culture: Notes on the Development of a Multi-Genre Tagged Corpus of Dagbani - Tristan Purvis
  
• The verbal phrase of Northern Sotho: A morpho-syntactic perspective - Gertrud Faaß
  
• Open-Content Text Corpus for African languages - Piotr Banski and Beata Wójtowicz
  
• Developing an Open source spell checker for Gĩkũyũ - Kamau Chege, Peter Waiganjo, Guy De Pauw, Lawrence Muchemi, Wanjiku Ng'ang'a, Kenneth Ngure and Jayne Mutiga
  
• Towards the Implementation of a Refined Data Model for a Zulu Machine-Readable Lexicon - Ronell Van der Merwe, Laurette Pretorius and Sonja Bosch
  
• Gathering Parallel Text Corpora for Three South African Language Pairs in the Autshumato Project - Hendrik J. Groenewald and Liza du Plooy
  
• Capturing Word-level Dependencies in Morpheme-based Language Modeling - Martha Yifiru Tachbelie and Wolfgang Menzel
  
• Towards The Manding Corpus: Texts Selection Principles and Metatext Markup - Artem Davydov
  
• SYNERGY: A Named Entity Recognition System for Resource-scarce Languages such as Swahili using Online Machine Translation - Rushin Shah, Bo Lin, Anatole Gershman and Robert Frederking
  
• A Knowledge-Light Approach to Luo Machine Translation and Part-of-Speech Tagging - Guy De Pauw, Naomi Maajabu and Peter Wagacha
  
• Improving Orthographic Transcriptions of Speech Corpora - Nicolas Laurens Oosthuizen, Martin Johannes Puttkammer and Martin Schlemmer
  
• Towards a Comprehensive, Machine-readable Dialectal Dictionary of Igbo - Wanjiku Ng'ang'a