Call For Papers

Africa has over 2000 languages and yet these are among the least represented in NLP research. 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-resourced 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 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 promote multidisciplinarity within the African NLP community with the goal of creating a holistic participatory NLP community that will produce NLP research and technologies that value fairness, ethics, decolonial theory, and data sovereignty

  • 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

This workshop follows the previous successful editions in 2020 and 2021. It will be taking place ONLINE in co-location with ICLR2022. No paper will be desk-rejected :)

Submission Instruction

We will accept extended abstracts (up to 2 pages) and full papers (up to 8 pages) with unlimited references and appendices. You can apply for AfricanNLP2022 mentorship

Accepted submissions will be eligible for oral or poster presentation and may opt-in to be published in an arXiv proceedings.

Contributions should be blinded and submitted using the template available in Latex and Word formats.

Important Dates

  • Submission Deadline(extended): March 7 2022 07:00 PM AoE
  • Acceptance Notifications: Mar 25 2022 09:00 PM AoE
  • Camera ready: to be decided
  • Workshop: April 25-29 2022

Please submit your papers on the following link: AfircaNLP2022 submission