AfLaT Newsletter

Dear AfLaT member,

at the end of a very productive year in African Language Technology, we would like to draw your attention to the following news items:

[1] The first call for papers for the AfLaT 2012 workshop has been published. The Workshop on Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages is a joint effort between SALTMIL and AfLaT and will take place as a pre-conference workshop of LREC2012. More information can be found here: http://aflat.org/content/call-papers-workshop-language-technology-normalisation-less-resourced-languages-aflat2012sal

[2] The AfLat 2011 workshop took place a couple of weeks ago, as a break-out session of the AGIS11 conference (Action week for Global Information Sharing) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A report of the 2011 edition of the AfLaT workshop series, including abstracts and slides, can be found here: http://aflat.org/content/third-workshop-african-language-technology-aflat-2011-report

[3] 2011 also saw the publication of a Special Issue on African Language Technology for the journal Language Resources & Evaluation. More information on this special issue can be found here: http://aflat.org/content/language-resources-evaluation-special-issue-african-language-technology

[4] If you or someone you know is involved in translation for African languages, kindly direct them to the following survey on behalf of Translators without borders:
https://www.research.net/s/africa_twb

We want to wish you a very nice holiday season and a very productive 2012!

best regards

The AfLaT team

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 30 September 2011 through the AGIS’11 website (http://www.agis11.org). 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 at http://www.agis11.org. For specific AfLaT2011 information, please consult AfLaT.org or contact us through aflat2011 [at] aflat [dot] org.

Dear AfLaT member,

the CTEXT research group (North-West University, Republic of South Africa) have a vacancy for a professor/associate professor/senior lecturer/lecturer. Please consult the document in attachment for more details.

best regards

Guy De Pauw
AfLaT.org

SECOND WORKSHOP ON AFRICAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY (AfLaT 2010)
18 MAY 2010, VALLETTA, MALTA

The submission deadline for the 2nd workshop on African Language Technology (AfLaT 2010) is rapidly approaching. Please note that your submission needs to be formatted according to the LREC guidelines. The author's kit (including Latex and Word templates) is now available:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?Author-s-Kit-and-Templates

We are also very happy to announce the invited speaker for the workshop, Prof. Justus Roux, who will give a presentation, titled ""Do we need linguistic knowledge for speech technology applications in African languages?""

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: 15 February, 2010
Notification of acceptance: 12 March, 2010
Camera-ready papers due: 22 March, 2010
Workshop: 18 May 2010

For the full call of papers, please consult:
http://aflat.org/?q=node/364

SECOND WORKSHOP ON AFRICAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY
AfLaT 2010
18 MAY 2010, VALLETTA, MALTA
Workshop at the seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) 2010

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 talk, followed by refereed research papers in computational linguistics. The focus will be on sub-Saharan African languages, excluding Arabic and languages with European origins, such as Afrikaans and African variants of English and French. 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.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit original work in the topic area of this workshop. Submissions should be formatted using the LREC style sheet (to be announced later on the Conference web site) and should not exceed four (4) pages, including references.

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 15 February, 2010 using the submission webpage: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/AfLaT2010.

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. For further information on this new initiative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?LREC2010-Map-of-Language-Resources.

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 LREC workshop proceedings. Notification of receipt will be emailed to the contact author.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 15 February, 2010
Notification of acceptance: 12 March, 2010
Camera-ready papers due: 22 March, 2010
Workshop: 18 May 2010

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

+ Guy De Pauw (Workshop Chair - Contact Person)
(1) CLiPS Research Group, University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium
(2) School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, PO Box 30197 - 00100GPO
Nairobi, Kenya

+ Handré Groenewald
Centre for Text Technology (CTexT), North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus), Potchefstroom 2520, South Africa

+ Gilles-Maurice de Schryver
(1) African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University, Rozier 44, 9000 Gent, Belgium
(2) Xhosa Department, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, Republic of South Africa
(3) TshwaneDJe HLT, Pretoria, Republic of South Africa

+ Peter Waiganjo Wagacha
School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, PO Box 30197 - 00100GPO Nairobi, Kenya

Dear AfLaT member,

we would like to draw your attention to some recent highlights in African Language Technology.

(1) Google announced the availability of their Swahili Machine Translation system
http://aflat.org/?q=node/346

(2) CALL FOR ABSTRACTS for the National Human Language Technology Network Day 2010
http://aflat.org/?q=node/345

(3) MURI Call for White Papers: "Structured Modeling for Low-Density Languages"
http://aflat.org/?q=node/347

Also several new publications and links have recently been added. We hope to see you soon at http://AfLaT.org!

with kind regards

the AfLaT team

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

Dear AfLaT member,

we are happy to present the proceedings and report for "The First Workshop on Language Technologies for African Languages", co-organized by the AfLaT team. You will find pictures, slides and papers of the workshop here:
http://www.aflat.org/?q=node/322

Workshop participants are entitled to a free hard copy of the proceedings. If you did not yet receive one, kindly send your mail address to guy [dot] depauw [at] aflat [dot] org.

Other recent news:
* Kevin Scannell has prepared a language independent toolkit for diacritic correction and developed a tool for Lingala diacritic correction. More info here: http://www.aflat.org/?q=node/329
* WOCAL 6 will feature two sessions on language technology. More info here: http://www.aflat.org/?q=node/327
* Martin Puttkammer has made a Tshivenda word list available. More info here: http://www.aflat.org/?q=node/330
* AfLaT has taken over Jouni Maho's website "Web Resources for African Languages". We are currently converting it into a database format, similar to AfLaT.org, to allow community-driven content management. The old web site can still be viewed here: http://africanlanguages.org

Position available: Professor/ Associate Professor/ Senior Lecturer/ Lecturer:
Human Language Technology/Computational Linguistics

North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus
Centre for Text Technology (CTexTTM): Unit for Languages and Literature in the South African Context

CTexT is an innovative HLT research and development centre that focuses on resource scarce languages. We thrive on new challenges and new ideas and mostly work under high time pressures in order to achieve the highest quality in all our work. Therefore we create opportunities for individuality within a team context, where we do not only support one another, but also challenge each other to reach new heights. We have a working culture that is informal, energetic and driven by success, and a working ethos that is based on mutual respect and trust. Our personnel, therefore, are self-driven, dynamic and innovative; we enjoy tackling several challenges at once, to work hard together to reach goals and to develop new ideas.
If this kind of setup excites you and you meet the requirements as set out below, we would like to invite you to apply for this position.
The successful candidate will be involved in teaching within the undergraduate Language Technology programme, research and development in collaboration with CTexT, and the supervision of post-graduate students in Computational Linguistics.

For more information, refer to the attached job profile.
For more information on CTexT, visit www.nwu.ac.za/ctext .

Post doctorate positions also available.