Application for Hundzula: NLP, Linguistics, and Digital Humanities Retreat 2027
Event Dates: 26–29 January 2027
Application Deadline: 19 October 2026
Notification of Acceptance: 09 November 2026
Location: University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits)
Apply here: https://forms.gle/zvtNnwPAyPbd3csh6
Target Audience:
Researchers based in South Africa are the primary focus. However, we warmly welcome applications from those outside South Africa who can attend in person (with their own funding). For 2027, we are excited to offer sponsorship for up to six participants from the SADC region, thanks to the support of the Data Science for Social Impact Lab at University of Pretoria and AI4D program.
Unlock the Future of Language Technologies: Join the Hundzula Retreat!
In recent years, African Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed groundbreaking advancements, creating new opportunities for African linguistics and the Digital Humanities. As these fields evolve, the synergy between Linguistics and NLP becomes increasingly vital. Linguistics offers the deep theoretical understanding of language structure, meaning, and social use that NLP systems need to perform effectively in African contexts. NLP, in turn, provides powerful tools to model, analyse, and scale linguistic insights computationally.
Inspired by leading initiatives such as SADiLaR and Masakhane, the Hundzula Workshop seeks to bridge this disciplinary gap, bringing together linguists, computational scientists, human language technologists, and engineers to co-create inclusive, contextually grounded AI for African languages and for African communities. The workshop aims to nurture the next generation of African research leaders who are fluent in both the scientific and sociocultural dimensions of language technology.
Introducing the 6th Edition of the Hundzula NLP, Linguistics, and Digital Humanities Retreat
The 6th edition of the Hundzula retreat will focus on low-resource language data creation, code-mixing, human linguistic validation, NLP annotation, synthetic data, data augmentation, multilingual NLP and LLM evaluation.
Hundzula is a hands-on research retreat. Selected participants will contribute by presenting research relevant to the theme and/or actively participating in interdisciplinary practical activities, where linguists, social scientists, and computational researchers will work together to create, validate, annotate and evaluate multilingual language resources.
A key goal of Hundzula 2027 is to expand collaboration with cognate disciplines - e.g. computational social science - and develop tangible collaborative research outputs and publications.
Researchers and postgraduate students in South Africa working in relevant areas are encouraged to apply. Participants from the SADC region are strongly encouraged to apply, with dedicated funding available to support selected SADC participants.
Don’t miss out on this transformative experience! Join us as we chart the future of African language technologies.
On Behalf of the 2027 Organising Committee.