The 4th RAIL (Resources for African Indigenous Languages) workshop will be co-located with EACL 2023 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop is an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on resources (data collections, tools, etc.) specifically targeted towards African indigenous languages. In particular, it aims to create the conditions for the emergence of a scientific community of practice that focuses on data, as well as computational linguistic tools specifically designed for or applied to indigenous languages found in Africa.

Previous workshops showed that the presented problems (and solutions) are not only applicable to African languages. Many issues are also relevant to other low-resource languages, such as different scripts and properties like tone. As such, these languages share similar challenges. This allows for researchers working on these languages with such properties (including non-African languages) to learn from each other, especially on issues pertaining to language resource development.

The RAIL workshop has several aims. First, it brings together researchers working on African indigenous languages, forming a community of practice for people working on indigenous languages. Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for discussions on novel, desired resources for future research in this area. Third, it enhances sharing of knowledge on the development of low-resource languages. Finally, it enables discussions on how to improve the quality as well as availability of the resources.

The workshop has “Impact of impairments on language resources” as its theme, but submissions on any topic related to properties of African indigenous languages may be accepted. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Digital representations of linguistic structures
• Descriptions of corpora or other data sets of African indigenous languages
• Building resources for (under resourced) African indigenous languages
• Developing and using African indigenous languages in the digital age
• Effectiveness of digital technologies for the development of African indigenous languages
• Revealing unknown or unpublished existing resources for African indigenous languages
• Developing desired resources for African indigenous languages
• Improving quality, availability and accessibility of African indigenous language resources