AfricaNLP Workshop

Please join us on the 26th of April via the Official ICLR 2020 Virtual Workshop Portal

Virtual Logistics

The workshop will be hosted online via the Official ICLR 2020 Virtual Workshop Portal
The workshop calendar can be viewed in your timezone here
Discussions, comments and questions can be posted on the Rocket Chat embedded in the virtual workshop portal
The invited and contributed talks are pre-recorded. But the end of the sessions, there will be a Live Q&A with the speakers of the invited and contributed talks. The hosts will ask the questions from rocket chat during those sessions
The poster sessions also consists of short 3-5 minute talks. We have asked the poster presenters to be available via rocket chat to answer questions. (Unfortunately live Q&A poster sessions per person were not logistically viable).
We encourage the authors and attendees to have their own zoom calls or chats. Let’s make those magical conference corridor chats happen! :)

About

Africa has over 2000 languages and yet is one of the least represented in African research. Andrew Caines, in his article The Geographic Diversity of NLP Conferences highlights the need for NLP work from the continent

Source The Geographic Diversity of NLP Conferences

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.

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