The development of technology increases our internet use, and most of the global languages have adapted themselves to the digital era. However, there are many regional, under-resourced languages that face challenges as they still lack developments in language technology [1]. One such language family is the Dravidian family of languages. Dravidian languages are primarily spoken in south India and Sri Lanka. Pockets of speakers are found in Nepal, Pakistan, Malaysia, other parts of India and elsewhere in the world. The Dravidian languages, which are 4,500 years old [2] and spoken by millions of speakers, are under-resourced in speech and natural language processing [1]. 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. To improve access to and production of information for monolingual speakers of Dravidian languages, it is necessary to have speech and languages technologies. The aim of these workshops is to save the Dravidian languages from extinction in technology. This is the first workshop on speech and language technologies for Dravidian languages. 

The broader objective of DravidianLangTech-2024 will be

• To investigate challenges related to speech and language resource creation for Dravidian languages. 

• To promote a research in speech and language technology in Dravidian languages. 

• To adopt appropriate language technology models which suit Dravidian languages.

• To provide opportunities for researchers from the Dravidian language community from around the world to collaborate with other researchers.

Our workshop theme focuses on being more inclusive and providing a platform for researchers to create LT of a more inclusive nature. We hope that through these engagements we can develop LT tools to be more inclusive of everyone, including marginalized people.

Call for Papers:

DravidianLangTech-2024 welcomes theoretical and practical paper submission 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 contributes 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.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Code-mixing/ Code-switching

• Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

• Computer-assisted language learning (CALL)

• Corpus development, tools, analysis, and evaluation

• COVID-19 alert, NLP Applications for Emergency Situations and Crisis Management 

• Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion

• Fake News, Spam, and Rumor Detection

• Hate speech detection and Offensive Language Detection

• Lexicons and Machine-readable dictionaries

• Linguistic Theories, Phonology, Morphological analysis, Syntax and Semantics

• Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, and Text summarization

• Multimodal Analysis

• Speech technology and Automatic Speech Recognition

• Image and Video Analysis of Dravidian Languages

• Object Detection and Recognition for the Dravidian language population

• Document Analysis and Understanding of Dravidian Languages

• Image Segmentation

• Deep Learning for Vision

• 3D Computer Vision

• Biometrics and Face Recognition

• Visual Scene Analysis and Understanding

• Medical and Healthcare Applications

• Normal/Impaired Speech Recognition of Dravidian Languages

• Designing Normal/Impaired speech Corpora in Dravidian languages

• Accent Recognition and Verification for Dravidian Speech 

• Emotions Detection and Recognition from Dravidian Speech

• Robotics and Autonomous Systems

• Augmented and Virtual Reality

• Gesture and Action Recognition

• Visual Search and Retrieval

• Vision Applications and Systems

Invited Speaker:

to be updated