a post-Conference Workshop of LREC 2022
Marseille (FR), 24-25 June 2022

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NEW => the Proceedings of the SIGUL 2022 Workshop are now available!

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The 1^st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL 2022) provided a forum for the presentation and discussion of cutting-edge research in text and speech processing for under-resourced languages by academic and industry researchers. SIGUL 2022 carried on the tradition of the CCURL-SLTU (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages – Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) Workshop Series, which has been organized since 2008 and, as LREC Workshops, since 2014. As usual, this Workshop spanned the research interest areas of less-resourced, under-resourced, endangered, minority and minoritized languages. Since LREC 2022 included a track dedicated specifically to endangered and less-resourced languages, SIGUL 2022 aimed to be a venue for networking and discussion as much as for scientific debate.

Over the last years, research in Natural Language Processing for less-resourced languages has taken momentum. Initiatives and events have flourished, such as AfricaNLP, ComputEL, LT4All, as well as hackathons, toolkits, special interest groups (SIGEL) and journals’ special issues. The topic of less-resourced languages has ceased to be niche and has gained space in major conferences such as LREC and ACL (see for instance the ACL 2022 Theme Track on “Language Diversity: from Low-Resource to Endangered Languages”).

The multiplication of research interest makes it even more necessary for the community that revolves around less-resourced languages to find opportunities for aggregation and discussion. It is also very important that these occasions leave space for communities and representatives of under-resourced and endangered languages, in order to ensure that the research and development of technological solutions are in line with the needs and demands of those communities, with a view to open and inclusive research with strong social impact.

Joint Session with MWE 2022

SIGUL 2022 held a joint session with the 18^th Workshop on MultiWord Expressions (MWE 2022). The goal was to foster future synergies that can address scientific challenges in the creation of resources, models and applications to deal with multiword expressions and related phenomena in low-resource scenarios, in accordance with one of the special topics in MWE 2022.