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

News

23 Oct 2026The first call for papers is out. Direct submissions are due 15 December 2026. See the important dates.

About the workshop

Over 1 billion people live in Africa, and its residents speak more than 2,000 languages. Those languages remain among the least represented in NLP research, and work on African languages is often sidelined at major venues.

Since 2020, the AfricaNLP workshops have been a central venue for organising, sustaining and growing a community of researchers focused on NLP for the benefit of the African continent. This is the eighth edition. Previous editions were held at ICLR in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024, at EACL in 2021 and 2026, and at ACL in 2025.

The theme for 2027 is from research to real-world AfricaNLP applications. Since 2020 the community has produced datasets, benchmarks and models for a growing set of African languages. Few of those artifacts have become systems in daily use on the continent. The obstacles are familiar: evaluation that does not survive contact with real users, bandwidth and compute constraints, data governance and consent, and resource maintenance beyond the funding cycle. This edition puts deployment and application at the centre.

AfricaNLP is a venue where first-time authors are welcome. Many papers published here have been their authors' first NLP paper, and often the first published NLP work for a given task in that language. We support them through the peer mentorship programme, the collaborator network of the Masakhane community, and review practices designed to avoid desk rejections.

At a glance

Venue	EACL 2027, Athens, Greece
Conference dates	9–14 March 2027
Workshop day	to be announced
Format	One day, hybrid, with in-person and virtual poster sessions
Submissions	ARR and direct submission, archival and non-archival
Shared task	Multimodal cultural understanding across African languages

Invited speakers

We plan two keynotes, at least one further invited talk, and a panel, with speakers from organisations building and deploying language technology on the continent.

Speakers are to be confirmed. We will announce them here, along with talk titles and the programme order, once their participation is confirmed.