Final Cfp: 6th AfricaNLP Workshop @ ACL 2025
Constantine Lignos
Final Call for Participation for the 6th AfricaNLP Workshop
Call For Papers
The 6th AfricaNLP workshop (https://sites.google.com/view/africanlp2025/home) will be co-located with ACL 2025 in Vienna, Austria. We invite your submissions with a deadline of March 7, 2025 (AoE).
Submission Details
We welcome submissions in the following formats:
Extended Abstracts (up to 2 pages): Non-archival submissions.
Papers (4-8 pages): Authors can decide whether their submission is archival or non-archival. We encourage longer papers (more than 4 pages) to opt for archival submission.
ARR Submissions: We accept papers previously submitted to ARR. Papers must have been submitted to the ARR December 2024 cycle or an earlier cycle and have received reviews and a metareview.
All submissions must not have been previously published in an archival venue.
Formatting: Submissions must be anonymous and must follow the ACL template (LaTeX and Word formats available). The Overleaf template is available at:
https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computational-linguistics-acl-conference/jvxskxpnznfj
Submission portal: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2025/Workshop/AfricaNLP
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: March 7, 2025 (AoE)
Acceptance Notification: April 17, 2025 (AoE)
Camera-ready Deadline: May 9, 2025 (AoE)
Workshop Date: July 31 or August 1, 2025
About AfricaNLP 2025
The AfricaNLP workshop has become a core event for the African NLP community and has drawn global attendance and interest for researchers working on African languages, African corpora, and tasks with importance in the African context.
In the current landscape, large language models (LLMs) have seen widespread use and significant innovation, yet African languages remain underrepresented. To address this disparity, the theme for the 2025 workshop is "Multilingual and Multicultural-aware LLMs." The workshop aspires to bring together a diverse group of researchers to explore solutions, collaborations, and innovation around enhancing LLMs’ capabilities in African languages and ensuring cultural awareness in their applications.
This workshop has several aims:
Engage diverse stakeholders: invite a variety of speakers from industry, research networks and academia to get their perspectives on the state of multilingual and multicultural-aware LLMs in African languages.
Address challenges and opportunities: Provide a platform to discuss both the potential benefits and risks of deploying LLMs in African contexts.
Foster collaboration: Encourage interaction between academic, industry, and independent researchers to advance NLP for the African continent.
Bridge communities: Strengthen connections between the African linguistics and NLP communities, highlighting the importance of linguistic expertise for African languages.
Showcase African NLP: Provide a platform for the African NLP community to share their work with a global audience.
Promote inclusivity and mentorship: Support junior researchers and first-time authors through mentorship and engagement.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
analyses of African languages by means of computational linguistics
empirical studies reporting results from applying or adapting NLP developed for high-resource languages to African languages
new model architectures tailored for African languages
new corpora for African languages
using NLP techniques on African datasets
text generation for African languages
methods addressing out-of-domain generalization for NLP tasks with training data in very limited domains
transfer learning between African languages or from higher-resourced to lower-resourced languages
challenges or solutions for resource gathering for African NLP tasks
crowd-sourcing and open-sourcing software for African NLP
multidisciplinary and participatory research in African NLP
tutorials for African NLP for education or development purposes
new resources for African NLP
development of NLP systems for African languages for production
socio-linguistic research for African languages and their decolonization
ethical considerations for African NLP
This workshop follows the previously successful editions in 2020-24. It will be hybrid and co-located with ACL 2025.
Keynote Speakers
We are pleased to announce the following invited speakers:
Sebastian Ruder (Meta)
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed (UBC, MBZUAI)
Jesujoba Alabi (Saarland University)
Hellina Hailu Nigatu (UC Berkeley, MBZUAI)
Joyce Nabende (Makerere University)
Contact
For any questions, please contact the workshop organizers at africanl...@googlegroups.com.
We look forward to your submissions and participation.
Best regards,
AfricaNLP 2025 Organizers