Human Language Processing of Resource Scarce Languages Workshop
Under International Conference on Advanced Technologies and Humanitarian Sciences
July 25th-26th, 2019 – Rabat, Morocco



The world is subjected to a massive transformation from manufacturing economies into an information economy, in which the indices of value are changing from material to non-material resources. This revolution is leading to a real danger for the survival of many languages and the future of their related cultures. Facing to this danger, the last years have seen a rising trend in exploring human language processing methods to other languages than English.

Nevertheless, the majority of tools and methods developed for language processing have so far focused on a quite limited number of languages, namely European and East-Asian languages. However, there is an essential requirement for all people over the world to be able to use their mother tongue languages when accessing information on the Internet or by means of devices such as computer, smartphone, and tablet. For this purpose, it is essential to react as long as there is still time to build resources and to train specialist able to develop them.

To this end, we propose a workshop on Human Language Processing of Resource Scarce Language (HLR-RSL). Its goal is not only to bring together researchers working on resource scarce languages, but also to enable the rest of the community to be aware of the issues and challenges. We will principally welcome contributions tackling the following issues:

1) RSL-Mapping the field: What is the present status of language processing and the employ of RSLs in the digital and social media environments? What do we know about existing language processing for RSLs? How to illustrate an inclusive image and build a road map for future? Who are the stakeholders to be concerned? What is the experience of researchers?

2) RSL-Resource building: How are the RSLs dealing with scarcity of resource and related problems of standards, financial support, usability, sharing, etc.? What are the insights and roles of different actors including the governments, industry and language communities? What are the further challenges affected by multilingual societies? What are the language preservation strategies for RSLs in the digital age?

3) RSL-technology development: What are the challenges in the development of specific technologies for RSLs at text, speech and multi-modal levels. How is processing employed in fields such as communication, education, entertainment, health, administration, etc?


Topics:

This workshop is intended to present research on human language processing, computational linguistics, applied linguistics and related areas such as:

• Development of resources and linguistic tools (written / oral);
• Retrieval and extraction of information;
• Optical character recognition;
• Learning and teaching mediated by technology;
• Web and mobile development;
• Serious games;
• Machine translation systems;
• Speech recognition;
• Text-to-speech synthesis.