The rise in ML community efforts on the African continent has led to a growing interest in Natural Language Processing, particularly for African languages which are typically low resource languages. This interest is manifesting in the form of national, regional, continental and even global collaborative efforts to build corpora, as well as the application of the aggregated corpora to various NLP tasks. These include;

•  The Niger-Volta Project - Speech Recognition, Language Identification, Machine Translation & Natural Language Processing for West African Languages 

• Masakhane.io - A Focus on Machine Translation for African Languages

• Cocohub.cc - A crowdsourced dataset builder and community for NLP in underrepresented languages

• Umva.ai - An initiative  to build a Natural Language Processing Platform for Kinyarwanda and to make it available to all developers and for all use cases 

• EthioNLP - Ethiopian Natural Language Processing Research

• The AI4D - African Language Dataset Challenge - A community effort to help uncover and create African Language Datasets for improved representation in the field of NLP

This workshop therefore has several aims; 

• to showcase this work being done by the African NLP community and provide a platform to share this expertise with a global audience interested in NLP techniques for low resource languages

• to provide a platform for the groups involved with the various projects to meet, interact, share and forge closer collaboration 

• to provide a platform for junior researchers to present papers, solutions, and begin interacting with the wider NLP community

• to present an opportunity for more experienced researchers to further publicize their work and inspire younger researchers through keynotes and invited talks

Call for Submissions

We call for 2-page paper submissions for oral and poster presentations on a wide variety of NLP tasks for African languages. This includes, but is not limited to, submissions which:

• use or create African NLP datasets

• highlight the importance of geography diversity

• describe NLP techniques that specifically cater to languages that are low resourced or morphologically complex

• highlight challenges of existing techniques being used on African languages

Papers should be submitted using the ICLR template which can be found at https://github.com/ICLR/Master-Template/blob/master/archive/iclr2020.zip

Submissions will be evaluated and selected through a peer-review process.

Submission deadline:       February 14, 2020 

Notification to authors:     February 25, 2020

Camera-ready copy deadline: March 15, 2020

Workshop:                        April 26, 2020