The development of technology increases our internet use, and most of the world's languages have adapted themselves to the digital era. However, many regional, under-resourced languages face challenges as they still lack developments in language technology. One such language family is the Dravidian family of languages (40+ languages). Dravidian languages are primarily spoken in south India and Sri Lanka, while pockets of speakers are found in Nepal, Pakistan, and elsewhere in South Asia. Although the Dravidian languages are 4,500 years old and are currently spoken by hundreds of millions of native speakers, their natural language processing resources and tools are limited. The Dravidian languages are divided into four groups: South, South-Central, Central, and North groups. Dravidian morphology is agglutinating and exclusively suffixal. Syntactically, Dravidian languages are head-final and left-branching. They are free-constituent order languages. In order to improve access to and production of information for monolingual speakers of Dravidian languages, it is necessary to promote the research in speech and language technologies. We particularly encourage computational approaches that address either practical application or improving resources for a given language in the field.

NLP research in Dravidian languages is still in the initial stage compared to other high-resourced languages. This special issue is dedicated to reporting the recent development and providing an overview of the state-of-the-art speech and language technologies research in Dravidian languages. Moreover, it identifies the existing tools, resources, evaluates recent methodologies and ongoing activities.

The broader objective of the special issue will be

To investigate challenges related to speech and language resource creation for machine learning and deep learning for Dravidian languages.To promote research in speech and language technology in Dravidian languages.To adopt appropriate language technology models that suit Dravidian languages.
Our special issues welcome original/ novel work in the theoretical and empirical investigation on any Dravidian languages (Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tulu, Allar, Aranadan, Attapadya Kurumba, Badaga, Beary, Betta Kurumba, Bharia, Bishavan, Brahui, Chenchu, Duruwa, Eravallan, Gondi, Holiya, Irula, Jeseri, Kadar, Kaikadi, Kalanadi, Kanikkaran, Khiwar, Kodava, Kolami, Konda, Koraga, Kota, Koya, Kurambhag Paharia, Kui, Kumbaran, Kunduvadi, Kurichiya, Kurukh, Kurumba, Kuvi, Madiya, Mala Malasar, Malankuravan, Malapandaram, Malasar, Malto, Manda, Muduga, Mullu Kurumba, Muria, Muthuvan, Naiki, Ollari, Paliyan, Paniya, Pardhan, Pathiya, Pattapu, Pengo, Ravula, Sholaga, Thachanadan, Toda, Wayanad Chetti, and Yerukala) that contribute to research in language processing,speech technologies or resources for the same. We will particularly encourage studies that address either practical application or improving resources for a given language in the field.

We invite submissions on topics that include, but not limited to, the following:

Code-mixing/Code-switchingCognitive Modeling and PsycholinguisticsComputer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL)Corpus Development, Tools, Analysis and EvaluationComputational Phonology and MorphologyCOVID-19 applications, NLP Applications for Emergency Situations and Crisis ManagementDiscourse and PragmaticsEquality, Diversity, and InclusionFake News, Spam, and Rumor DetectionHate Speech Detection and Offensive Language DetectionInformation Extraction and Information RetrievalKnowledge RepresentationLanguage Modelling and EmbeddingsLexicons and Machine-Readable DictionariesMachine TranslationSentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument MiningSemantics: Lexical, Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, Entailment and Other areaSpeech Technology and Automatic Speech RecognitionSyntax: Tagging, Chunking and ParsingQuestion Answering and Machine ComprehensionText SummarizationMultimodal AnalysisNLP Applications
Paper submission deadline: 30th Nov 2021

The submission system will be open around one week before the first paper comes in. When submitting your manuscript please select the article type “VSI: SP:DravidianLangTech”. Please submit your manuscript before the submission deadline.

All submissions deemed suitable to be sent for peer review will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Once your manuscript is accepted, it will go into production, and will be simultaneously published in the current regular issue and pulled into the online Special Issue. Articles from this Special Issue will appear in different regular issues of the journal, though they will be clearly marked and branded as Special Issue articles.

Please see an example here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/computer-speech-and-language/vol/66/suppl/C

Please ensure you read the Guide for Authors before writing your manuscript. The Guide for Authors and the link to submit your manuscript is available on the Journal’s homepage.

For further information and questions, please contact,

Guest Editors

Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, National University of Ireland Galway
(bharathi.raja@insight-centre.org)

Anand Kumar M, National Institute of Technology Karnataka
Surathkal (m_anandkumar@nitk.edu.in)

Thenmozhi D, SSN College of Engineering, Tamil Nadu, (theni_d@ssn.edu.in)

Dhivya Chinnapa, Thomson Reuters, USA
(dhivya.chinnappa@thomsonreuters.com)

Sajeetha Thavareesan, Eastern University, Sri Lanka (sajeethas@esn.ac.lk)