About the Workshop

The AfricaNLP workshop has become a core event for the African NLP community and has drawn global attendance and interest for researchers working on African languages, African corpora, and tasks with importance in the African context. 

In the current landscape, large language models (LLMs) have seen widespread use and significant innovation, yet African languages remain underrepresented. To address this disparity, the theme for the 2025 workshop is "Multilingual and Multicultural-aware LLMs." The workshop aspires to bring together a diverse group of researchers to explore solutions, collaborations, and innovation around enhancing LLMs’ capabilities in African languages and ensuring cultural awareness in their applications.

The workshop has several aims:

• To invite a variety of speakers from industry, research networks, and academia to get their perspectives on the development of large language models and how African languages have and have not been represented in this work

• To provide a venue to discuss the benefits and potential harms of these language models on the speakers of African languages and African researchers. 

• To enable positive interaction between academic, industry, and independent researchers around this theme and encourage collaboration and engagement for the benefit of the African continent

• To foster further relationships between African linguistics and NLP communities. It is clear that linguistic input about African languages is key in the evaluation and development of African models

• To showcase work being done by the African NLP community and provide a platform to share this expertise with a global audience interested in NLP techniques for low-resource languages

• To promote multidisciplinarity within the African NLP community to create a holistic participatory NLP community that will produce NLP research and technologies that value fairness, ethics, decolonial theory, and data sovereignty 

• To provide a platform for the groups involved with the various projects to meet, interact, share, and forge closer collaboration

• To provide a platform for junior researchers to present papers and solutions and begin interacting with the wider NLP community

• To present an opportunity for more experienced researchers to publicize their work further and inspire younger researchers through keynotes and invited talks

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• analyses of African languages by means of computational linguistics

• empirical studies reporting results from applying or adapting NLP developed for high-resource languages to African languages

• new model architectures tailored for African languages

• new corpora for African languages

• using NLP techniques on African datasets

• text generation for African languages

• methods addressing out-of-domain generalization for NLP tasks with training data in very limited domains

• transfer learning between African languages or from higher-resourced to lower-resourced languages

• challenges or solutions for resource gathering for African NLP tasks

• crowd-sourcing and open-sourcing software for African NLP

• multidisciplinary and participatory research in African NLP

• tutorials for African NLP for education or development purposes

• new resources for African NLP

• development of NLP systems for African languages for production

• socio-linguistic research for African languages and their decolonization

• ethical considerations for African NLP

This workshop follows the previously successful editions in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. It will be hybrid and co-located with ACL 2025. No paper will be automatically desk-rejected.

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: March 7, 2025 (AoE)  March 10, 2025 AoE (deadline extended)

• Acceptance Notifications: April 17, 2025 (AoE)

• Camera-ready:  May 20, 2025 (AoE)

• Workshop date: July 31, 2025

Submission Details

We welcome submissions in the following formats:

• Extended Abstracts (up to 2 pages): Non-archival submissions.

• Papers (4-8 pages): Authors can decide whether their submission is archival or non-archival. We encourage longer papers (more than 4 pages) to opt for archival submission.

• ARR Submissions: We accept papers previously submitted to ARR. Papers must have been submitted to the ARR December 2024 cycle or an earlier cycle and have received reviews and a metareview.

Page limits do not include references, limitations and ethics sections, or appendices.

All papers must use the ACL paper template

All submissions must not have been previously published in an archival venue

Invited Speakers

Organizers

Program Committee 

• Idris Abdulmumin, Ahmadu Bello University

• Simbiat Ajao, University of Lagos

• Bunmi Akinremi, Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife

• Jesujoba Alabi, Universität des Saarlandes

• Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Universidade do Porto

• Victor Jotham Ashioya, Kabarak University

• Tadesse Destaw Belay, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Centro de Investigación en Computación

• Happy Buzaaba, Princeton University

• Emmanuel Kigen Chesire, Kabarak University

• Emmanuel Dorley, University of Florida

• Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Mila & McGill University

• Khalid Elmadani, New York University, Abu Dhabi

• Naome A Etori, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Eric Le Ferrand, Boston College

• Elodie Gauthier, Orange

• Gideon George, Data Science Nigeria

• Agam Goyal, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• David Guzmán, University of Toronto

• Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Masakhane Research Foundation

• Cari Beth Head, University of Florida

• Raphael Iyamu, University of Florida

• Sandeep Kumar Jha, LinkedIn Core AI

• Adejumobi Monjolaoluwa Joshua, University of Agriculture Abeokuta

• Sulaiman Kagumire, Makerere University

• Aditi Khandelwal, Mila & McGill University

• Alfred Malengo Kondoro, Hanyang University

• Sujay S Kumar, Tesla

• Sven Lampe, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg

• Melaku Lake, Injibara

• En-Shiun Annie Lee, Ontario Tech University

• Senyu Li, Mila & McGill University

• Weiran Lin, Carnegie Mellon University

• Elie Mulamba, Université de Kinshasa

• Francois Meyer, University of Cape Town

• Anjishnu Mukherjee, George Mason University

• Mulubrhan Abebe Nerea, University West

• Gebregziabihier Nigusie, Mizan Tepi University

• Chester Palen-Michel, Brandeis University

• Perez Ogayo, Oracle

• Kelechi Ogueji, ServiceNow

• Odunayo Ogundepo, University of Waterloo

• Tolúlopé Ògúnrèmí, Stanford University

• Jessica Ojo, Mila & McGill University

• Ifeoma Okoh, University of Ibadan

• Akintunde Oladipo, University of Waterloo

• Flora Oladipupo, Data Science Nigeria

• Stephen D. Richardson, Brigham Young University

• Nathaniel Romney Robinson, Whiting School of Engineering, JHU

• Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth

• Elizabeth Salesky, Google DeepMind

• Fabian David Schmidt, Bayerische Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

• Tajwaa Scott, California State University, Los Angeles

• Walelign Tewabe Sewunetie, African Institute for Mathematical Science, AIMS Rwanda

• Olamide Shogbamu, Data Science Nigeria

• Rashidat Damilola Sikiru, Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife

• Yueqi Song, Carnegie Mellon University 

• Van-Thuy Phi, RIKEN

• Jiayi Wang, University College London

• Seid Muhie Yimam, Universität Hamburg

• Hao Yu, Mila & McGill University

 Contacts & Slack Workplace

You are invited to join the Masakhane community Slack (channel #africanlp-acl2025-support). Meet other participants and find collaborators, mentors, and advice there. Organizers will be available on Slack to answer questions regarding submissions, format, topics, etc. If you have any doubt whether you can contribute to this workshop (e.g., if you have never written a paper, if you are new to NLP, if you do not have any collaborators, if you do not know LaTeX, etc.), please join Slack and contact us there as well. 

To reach out to the workshop organizers, please email africanlp-acl2025@googlegroups.com.

 Sponsors