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
Atelach Argaw - Stockholm University, Sweden
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
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

http://labh-curien.univ-st-etienne.fr/zulu/

Supported by Pascal 2 Network of Excellence

Abstract:

Zulu is an active learning competition. Participants are to build algorithms that can learn deterministic finite automata (DFA) by making the smallest number of membership queries to the server/oracle.

Motivations:

When learning language models, techniques usually make use of huge corpora that are unavailable in many less resourced languages (such as the Zulu language). One possible way around this problem is to interrogate an expert with a number of chosen queries, in an interactive mode, until a satisfying language model is reached. In this case, an important indicator of success is the amount of energy the expert has spent in order for
learning to be successful. A nice learning paradigm covering this situation is that of Query Learning, introduced by Dana Angluin.

In the field of Grammatical Inference, Query Learning was thoroughly investigated to learn deterministic finite automata (DFA). As negative results, it was proved that DFA could not be learned from just a polynomial number of membership queries nor from just a polynomial number of strong equivalence queries. On the other hand, algorithm L* designed by Angluin, was proved to learn DFA from a polynomial number of both membership and equivalence queries. These results yield several successfull applications in Robotics, Games and Agents Technologies, Information Retrieval, Hardware and Software Verification.

However, what has not been hardly studied is how to optimise the learning task by trying to minimize the number of queries while making queries for which the Oracle's work and answers are simple. These are strong motivations for stemming research in the direction of developing new interactive learning strategies and algorithms, that is the aim of this competition.

The competition:

Zulu (http://labh-curien.univ-st-etienne.fr/zulu/) is both a web based platform simulating an Oracle in a DFA learning task and a competition.

As a web platform, Zulu allows users to generate tasks, to interact with the Oracle in learning sessions and to record the results of the users. It provides the users with a baseline algorithm written in JAVA, or the elements allowing to build from scratch a new learning algorithm capable of interacting with the server.

The server can be accessed by any user/learner who has opened an account. The server acts as an Oracle for membership queries. A player can log inand ask for a target DFA. The server then computes how many queries itneeds to learn a reasonable machine (reasonable means less than 30% classification errors), and invites the player to interact in a learning session in which he can ask up to that number of queries.

At the end of the learning process the server gives the learner a set of unlabelled strings (a test set). The labels the learner submits are used to compute his score.

As a starting point the baseline algorithm, which is a simple variation of L*, with some sampling done to simulate equivalence queries, is given to the user, who can therefore play with some simple JAVA code for a start.

The competition itself will be held in the spring of 2010 and the results will be presented during a special session at the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference in Valencia, Spain, September 13-16, 2010(http://users.dsic.upv.es/workshops/icgi2010/)

Schedule:

• from now to March 1st, 2010: Zulu platform is open, anyone may
  register and have fun
  
• March 1st: Official beginning of the competition
  
• May 15th: Deadline for scoring, submissions closed
  
• June 1st: Notifications of the results
  
• June 20th: Deadline for submission of abstracts explaining participants strategies
  
• September 13-16th: workshop at ICGI
  

Prizes and publications:

The winner of the Zulu competition will receive a prize, to be announced
on the Zulu webpage. Participants are encouraged to present their
innovations either as full papers to the ICGI 2010 conference, or as
extended abstracts to the Zulu workshop that will be organised during
ICGI. A journal special issue will also be considered.

Scientific committee:

* Dana Angluin, Yale University, USA
* Leo Becerra Bonache, Universidad de Tarragona, Spain
* François Coste, IRISA, Rennes, France
* Alex Clark, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
* Ricard Gavalda, Universidad Politecnica de Barcelona, Spain
* Colin de la Higuera, University of Nantes, France
* Jean-Christophe Janodet, University of Lyon, France
* Aurelien Lemay, University of Lille, France
* Laurent Miclet, ENSAT Lannion and IRISA, France
* Tim Oates, University of Maryland, USA
* Anssi Yli Jyra, University of Helsinki, Finland
* Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands