The 8th International Workshop of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology for Minority Languages (SALTMIL, http://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
http://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 http://www.mica.edu.vn/sltu2012/) and in 2010 at University Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang, Malaysia (http://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 http://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

9:00	9:05	Opening
9:05	10:00	Justus Roux Invited Talk - Do we need linguistic knowledge for speech technology applications in African languages?
10:00	10:30	Aditi Sharma Grover, Gerhard B. van Huyssteen and Marthinus W. Pretorius An HLT profile of the official South African languages
10:30	11:00	coffee break
11:00	11:30	Piotr Banski and Beata Wójtowicz Open-Content Text Corpus for African languages
11:30	12:00	Guy De Pauw, Naomi Maajabu and Peter Wagacha A Knowledge-Light Approach to Luo Machine Translation and Part-of-Speech Tagging
12:00	12:30	Rushin Shah, Bo Lin, Anatole Gershman and Robert Frederking SYNERGY: A Named Entity Recognition System for Resource-scarce Languages such as Swahili using Online Machine Translation
12:30	13:00	Hendrik J. Groenewald and Liza du Plooy Processing Parallel Text Corpora for Three South African Language Pairs in the Autshumato Project
13:00	14:30	lunch
14:30	15:00	Ronell Van der Merwe, Laurette Pretorius and Sonja Bosch Towards the Implementation of a Refined Data Model for a Zulu Machine-Readable Lexicon
15:00	15:30	Gertrud Faaß The verbal phrase of Northern Sotho: A morpho-syntactic perspective
15:30	16:00	Martha Yifiru Tachbelie and Wolfgang Menzel Capturing Word-level Dependencies in Morpheme-based Language Modeling
16:00	16:30	coffee break
16:30	17:00	Nicolas Laurens Oosthuizen, Martin Johannes Puttkammer and Martin Schlemmer Improving Orthographic Transcriptions of Speech Corpora
17:00	17:30	Artem Davydov Towards The Manding Corpus: Texts Selection Principles and Metatext Markup

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

9:00	9:05	Opening
9:05	10:00	Justus Roux Invited Talk - Do we need linguistic knowledge for speech technology applications in African languages?
10:00	10:30	Aditi Sharma Grover, Gerhard B. van Huyssteen and Marthinus W. Pretorius An HLT profile of the official South African languages
10:30	11:00	coffee break
11:00	11:30	Piotr Banski and Beata Wójtowicz Open-Content Text Corpus for African languages
11:30	12:00	Guy De Pauw, Naomi Maajabu and Peter Wagacha A Knowledge-Light Approach to Luo Machine Translation and Part-of-Speech Tagging
12:00	12:30	Rushin Shah, Bo Lin, Anatole Gershman and Robert Frederking SYNERGY: A Named Entity Recognition System for Resource-scarce Languages such as Swahili using Online Machine Translation
12:30	13:00	Hendrik J. Groenewald and Liza du Plooy Processing Parallel Text Corpora for Three South African Language Pairs in the Autshumato Project
13:00	14:30	lunch
14:30	15:00	Kamau Chege, Peter Wagacha, Guy De Pauw, Lawrence Muchemi, Wanjiku Ng'ang'a, Kenneth Ngure and Jayne Mutiga  Developing an Open source spell checker for Gikuyu
15:00	15:30	Gertrud Faaß The verbal phrase of Northern Sotho: A morpho-syntactic perspective
15:30	16:00	Martha Yifiru Tachbelie and Wolfgang Menzel Capturing Word-level Dependencies in Morpheme-based Language Modeling
16:00	16:30	coffee break
16:30	17:00	Ronell Van der Merwe, Laurette Pretorius and Sonja Bosch Towards the Implementation of a Refined Data Model for a Zulu Machine-Readable Lexicon
17:00	17:30	Nicolas Laurens Oosthuizen, Martin Johannes Puttkammer and Martin Schlemmer Improving Orthographic Transcriptions of Speech Corpora
17:30	18:00	Artem Davydov Towards The Manding Corpus: Texts Selection Principles and Metatext Markup
18:00	18:30	Wanjiku Ng'ang'a  Towards a Comprehensive, Machine-readable Dialectal Dictionary of Igbo
18:30	19:00	Tristan Purvis Corpus Building in a Predominantly Oral Culture: Notes on the Development of a Multi-Genre Tagged Corpus of Dagbani

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
  

We are happy to report that we received over 20 papers for the AfLaT 2010 workshop. We thank all of the authors and wish them best of luck during the reviewing process.

We look forward to seeing you in Malta!

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.

OBJECTIVES OF THE WORKSHOP

• Assess the state-of-the-art in the development of BLARKs for sub-Saharan African languages
• Address issues of efficient and sufficient collection and annotation of spoken and written language samples
• Define particular issues in machine translation, speech recognition, and other language technology applications
• Discuss community needs in education and vitality of language and culture, such as localization of operating systems and applications, spelling checkers, dictionaries, computer assisted language learning and the like
• Assess the role of language technology in bridging the digital divide, particularly in light of rapidly emerging technologies, such as mobile phones
• Strengthen the network of researchers working in the domain of African Language 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 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: 19 February, 2010 (extended!)
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
  http://aflat.org/guy

• Handré Groenewald
  Centre for Text Technology (CTexT), North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus), Potchefstroom 2520, South Africa
  http://www.nwu.ac.za/ctext

• 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
  http://tshwanedje.com/members/gmds/cv.html

• Peter Waiganjo Wagacha
  School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, PO Box 30197 - 00100GPO Nairobi, Kenya
  http://www.uonbi.ac.ke/faculties/staff-profile.php?id=168090&name=waiganjo&fac code=52

INVITED SPEAKER

Justus Roux: "Do we need linguistic knowledge for speech technology applications in African languages?"

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Tunde Adegbola - African Languages Technlogy Initiative (Alt-i), Nigeria
Tadesse Anberbir - Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
Winston Anderson - University of South Africa, South Africa
Lars Asker - Stockholm University, Sweden
Etienne Barnard - Meraka Institute, South Africa
Piotr Bański - University of Warsaw, Poland
Ansu Berg - North-West University, South Africa
Sonja Bosch - University of South Africa, South Africa
Chantal Enguehard - LINA - UMR CNRS, France
Gertrud Faaß - Universität Stuttgart, Germany
Bjorn Gamback - Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden
Katherine Getao - NEPAD e-Africa Commission, South Africa
Dafydd Gibbon - Universität Bielefeld, Germany
Arvi Hurskainen - University of Helsinki, Finland
Fred Kitoogo - Makerere University, Uganda
Roser Morante - University of Antwerp, Belgium
Lawrence Muchemi - University of Nairobi, Kenya
Wanjiku Ng'ang'a - University of Nairobi, Kenya
Odetunji Odejobi - University College Cork, Ireland
Chinyere Ohiri-Anichie - University of Lagos, Nigeria
Sulene Pilon - North-West University, South Africa
Laurette Pretorius - University of South Africa, South Africa
Rigardt Pretorius - North-West University, South Africa
Danie Prinsloo - University of Pretoria, South Africa
Justus Roux - North-West University, South Africa
Kevin Scannell - Saint Louis University, United States
Gerhard Van Huyssteen - Meraka Institute, South Africa

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.

OBJECTIVES OF THE WORKSHOP

• Assess the state-of-the-art in the development of BLARKs for sub-Saharan African languages
• Address issues of efficient and sufficient collection and annotation of spoken and written language samples
• Define particular issues in machine translation, speech recognition, and other language technology applications
• Discuss community needs in education and vitality of language and culture, such as localization of operating systems and applications, spelling checkers, dictionaries, computer assisted language learning and the like
• Assess the role of language technology in bridging the digital divide, particularly in light of rapidly emerging technologies, such as mobile phones
• Strengthen the network of researchers working in the domain of African Language 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
  http://aflat.org/guy

• Handré Groenewald
  Centre for Text Technology (CTexT), North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus), Potchefstroom 2520, South Africa
  http://www.nwu.ac.za/ctext

• 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
  http://tshwanedje.com/members/gmds/cv.html

• Peter Waiganjo Wagacha
  School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, PO Box 30197 - 00100GPO Nairobi, Kenya
  http://www.uonbi.ac.ke/faculties/staff-profile.php?id=168090&name=waiganjo&fac code=52

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

to be announced

INVITED SPEAKER

to be announced