RAIL 2025 : Sixth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language

First call for papers Sixth Workshop on Resources for African
Indigenous Language (RAIL)
Co-located with DHASA 2025
https://dh2025.digitalhumanities.org.za/

RAIL Workshop date: 10 November 2025
DHASA Conference dates: 10-14 November 2025
Venue: CSIR International Convention Centre.

The sixth Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop
will be co-located with the Digital Humanities Association of Southern
Africa (DHASA) 2025 conference at the CSIR International Convention
Centre in Pretoria, South Africa, on 10 November 2025. The RAIL
workshop is an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on
African indigenous languages resources such as natural languages
processing (NLP) tools, Human Language Technologies (HLT), data
collections, and annotations. This workshop aims to foster a
scientific community of practice that focuses on computational
linguistic tools and data that are designed for or applied to the
indigenous languages of Africa.

Many African languages are under-resourced while only a few are
considered to be somewhat better resourced. These languages often share
interesting properties such as writing systems, making them different
from most high-resourced languages. From a computational perspective,
these languages lack enough corpora to undertake high level development
of NLP and HLT tools, which in turn impedes the development of African
languages in these areas. During previous workshops, it was noted that
the problems and solutions presented were not only applicable to
African languages but were also relevant to many other low-resource
languages across the world. Because these languages share similar
challenges, this workshop provides researchers with opportunities to
work collaboratively on issues of language resource development and
learn from each other.

The RAIL workshop has several aims. First, the workshop brings together
researchers who work on African indigenous languages, forming a
community of practice for people working on indigenous languages.
Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished
existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in
a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for
discussions on novel, desired resources for future research in this
area. Third, it enhances sharing of knowledge on the development of
low-resource languages. Finally, it enables discussions on how to
improve the quality as well as availability of the resources.

The workshop has “Language resources in the age of large language
models” as its theme, but submissions on any topic related to
properties of African indigenous languages (including related non-
African languages) may be accepted. Suggested topics include (but are
not limited to) the following:
* Digital representations of linguistic structures
* Descriptions of corpora or other data sets of African indigenous
languages
* Building resources for (under-resourced) African indigenous languages
* Developing and using African indigenous languages in the digital age
* Effectiveness of digital technologies for the development of African
indigenous languages
* Revealing unknown or unpublished existing resources for African
indigenous languages
* Developing desired resources for African indigenous languages
* Improving quality, availability and accessibility of African
indigenous language resources


Submission requirements:

We invite papers on original, unpublished work related to the topics of
the workshop. Submissions, presenting completed work, may consist of up
to eight (8) pages of content plus additional pages of references. The
final camera-ready version of accepted long papers are allowed one
additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ feedback
can be incorporated. Papers should be formatted according to the DHASA
style sheet which is provided on the Journal of the Digital Humanities
Association of Southern Africa website double-blind, so make sure to anonymise your submission (e.g., do not
provide author names, affiliations, project names, etc.) Limit the
amount of self citations (anonymised citations should not be used). The
RAIL workshop follows the DHASA submission requirements.

Please submit papers in PDF format (the submission link will be
available soon). Accepted papers will be published in proceedings
linked to the DHASA conference.


Important dates:

Submission deadline: 14 July 2025
Date of notification: 16 September 2025
Camera ready copy deadline: 24 October 2025
Workshop: 10 November 2025
DHASA conference: 10 November 2025-14 November 2025


Organising Committee

Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa
Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources
(SADiLaR), South Africa