AfricaNLP 2027

The 8th Workshop on African Natural Language Processing

EACL 2027, Athens, Greece
9–14 March 2027
One day, hybrid
workshop day to be announced

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Call for papers

AfricaNLP 2027 will be held as a one-day hybrid workshop at EACL 2027 in Athens, Greece. The theme is from research to real-world AfricaNLP applications.

Topics

We invite submissions in the following areas:

• NLP research for languages spoken in Africa, including systems, resources and evaluation methodologies
• Position papers regarding NLP for African languages
• Best practices for collecting data and engaging with speaker communities for African languages
• Multilingual and multimodal language technology, datasets and evaluation for African languages
• Responsible AI, and practical applications that meet real needs in African communities
• Other research that advances NLP to the benefit of the African continent and globally

Given this year's theme, we particularly welcome work on moving research artifacts into real use: evaluation with real users, deployment under bandwidth and compute constraints, data governance and consent, and the long-term maintenance of language resources.

Tracks

We accept papers submitted through ARR, the ACL Rolling Review, and by direct submission to the workshop.

Accepted papers may appear in the archival workshop proceedings, or be presented non-archivally so that submitting to AfricaNLP does not prevent publication elsewhere. Findings papers are welcome as part of the non-archival programme, and subject to space, Findings authors will be able to present relevant papers as posters.

Submission formats

• Full papers: 4 to 8 pages, archival or non-archival.
• Extended abstracts: up to 2 pages, non-archival.
• ARR papers: papers with completed reviews and meta-reviews from an eligible ARR cycle.

Paper requirements

All submissions follow the ARR submission requirements, including:

• Long papers and short papers
• Instructions for two-way anonymized review
• Authorship
• Citation and comparison
• Multiple submission, resubmission and withdrawal policies
• ACL’s publication ethics policy, and ARR’s ethics policy with the responsible NLP research checklist
• ACL’s disclosure policy
• Limitations
• Writing assistance
• Paper submission and templates
• Optional supplementary materials

Accepted archival papers get one extra page of content in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

Writing assistance

We follow the ACL policy on AI writing assistance.

• Spell checkers, grammar tools such as Grammarly, and predictive typing need no disclosure.
• Any other use of AI writing or coding assistants goes in the responsible NLP research checklist, with what you used them for.
• Check generated text and code for accuracy, and cite the original sources of any ideas or text a model gives you.
• Read every reference a model suggests before you cite it.
• A model cannot be an author. The named authors are responsible for the whole paper.

Programme

One day, with in-person and virtual poster sessions and oral spotlight talks. We expect a significant number of authors to join remotely because of visa restrictions and the cost of travel, and the virtual sessions are a full part of the programme. See attending.

Desk rejections

We work hard to avoid them. Submissions are checked for compliance immediately after the deadline, and authors are given three days to correct any non-compliant submission.

Submitting

Direct submissions are due 15 December 2026, and ARR papers must be committed by 22 December 2026. Submission links and templates will be posted here. All dates are on the important dates page.

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AfricaNLP 2027. Co-located with EACL 2027, Athens, 9–14 March 2027.