ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL)

Created in April 2017, SIGUL is a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). This year, SIGUL enters the fifth year and now has more than 300 members. The SIGUL Board is elected every two years, and last year SIGUL had a new Board officer:

Chair and ISCA liaison representative: Sakriani Sakti (JAIST, Japan)

Co-chair and ELRA liaison representative: Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italy)

Secretary: Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain)

SIGUL has organized various events, including the Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) Workshop Series, which has been organized since 2008, and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL), which has been organized as LREC Workshop since 2014. From this year, the tradition of CCURL-SLTU will be united into one SIGUL Workshop and planned to be held as a Satellite Workshop of LREC or INTERSPEECH.

 Annual Meetings of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL 2022) were held successively:

SIGUL2022 in Marseille (FR) on 24-25 June 2022 as Satellite Workshop of LREC 2022,

SIGUL 2023 in with ISCA as INTERSPEECH satellite workshop (https://sigul-2023.ilc.cnr.it/),

SIGUL 2024 with ELRA as LREC-COLING workshop (https://sigul-2024.ilc.cnr.it/).

The SIGUL venue  provide a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research in NLP/SLP for under-resourced languages to both academic and industry researchers, and also offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and from varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• general research on under-resourced languages.

• transfer-learning techniques for under-resourced languages (zero-shot, few-shot training);

• unsupervised and semi-supervised methods to build applications for under-resourced languages;

• use of multilingual pre-trained language models to under-resourced languages;

• speech technologies for under-resourced languages.   

• Also position papers on methodological, ethical, or institutional issues are welcome.

 Additionally, we are currently organizing LT4All 2.0 in collaboration with UNESCO, which
will take place in February 2025. 

SIGUL Board

Sakriani Sakti

Claudia Soria

Maite Melero