Call for Papers
Workshop
Digital Avenues for Low-Resource Languages of Sub-Saharan Africa (DASSA’2025)
27-28 May 2025
Organized by the initiative AI4AfricanLanguages (Leveraging AI for African Low-Resource Languages to Enhance Crises Monitoring), and supported by the French National Research Agency.
SCOPE
Automatic language processing has made significant progress thanks to Artificial Intelligence, particularly with the emergence of large language models (LLMs). However, these advances mainly focus on dominant languages such as English and French. For more than 6,000 languages around the world, the lack of usable data is an obstacle to training models.
The performance of LLMs strongly depends on the volume, quality, and representativeness of training data, elements that are often insufficient for under-resourced languages such as the languages of sub-Saharan Africa, many of which are mainly oral. This data deficit poses challenges such as decreased model accuracy, overfitting to scarce resources, and difficulty integrating these languages into generic or specialized applications (e.g., media-based monitoring). The challenge is even greater for voice systems, as radio remains a primary medium in many sub-Saharan African regions.
This workshop aims to explore the intersections between linguistics, data, learning, and models to address the challenges of under-representation of sub-Saharan languages.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
The workshop will address the various stages involved in processing textual and vocal data (including collection, pre-processing, and learning) for under-resourced sub-Saharan African languages. Contributions are welcome from disciplines like data mining, linguistics, machine learning, AI, and data science.
The main topics of interest include:
- Data collection and curation in low-resource languages
- Evaluation and impact of biases introduced during collection and annotation
- Integration of multi-modal data (text and audio)
- Learning in a context of noisy and low-resource data
- Frugal learning (learning resources, computational resources)
- Explainability of machine learning approaches
- Contributions and limitations of LLMs
- Speech recognition and synthesis
- Model evaluation and benchmarking
All innovative research addressing these themes is welcomed, irrespective of the field of application (e.g., health, agriculture, social sciences and humanities, digital humanities, etc.).
SUBMISSIONS
Every accepted submission must have at least one author registered for the workshop. All submitted extended abstracts must be written in English and follow the LNCS format (guidelines) with a 6-page limit (including title page, figures, references, and optional appendix).
Submissions should be sent electronically in PDF format via EasyChair: submission link.
Oral presentations may be given in French or English.
IMPORTANT DATES
- Submission deadline : March 31, 2025
- Notification to authors : April 20, 2025
- Workshop : May 27-28, 2025
PARTICIPATION
The workshop will be held in Yaoundé, Cameroon as a hybrid event, combining both in-person and online participation.
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
- Paulin Melatiaga (Université de Yaoundé I, Cameroun) – paulinyonta @ gmail.com
- Sarah Valentin (UMR TETIS, Cirad, France) – sarah.valentin @ cirad.fr
- Damien Nouvel (INALCO, France) – damien.nouvel @ inalco.fr