Elicitation and Corpus of Spontaneous Sign Language Discourse Representation Diagrams

Michael Filhol


Abstract
While Sign Languages have no standard written form, many signers do capture their language in some form of spontaneous graphical form. We list a few use cases (discourse preparation, deverbalising for translation, etc.) and give examples of diagrams. After hypothesising that they contain regular patterns of significant value, we propose to build a corpus of such productions. The main contribution of this paper is the specification of the elicitation protocol, explaining the variables that are likely to affect the diagrams collected. We conclude with a report on the current state of a collection following this protocol, and a few observations on the collected contents. A first prospect is the standardisation of a scheme to represent SL discourse in a way that would make them sharable. A subsequent longer-term prospect is for this scheme to be owned by users and with time be shaped into a script for their language.
Anthology ID:
2020.signlang-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie A. Hochgesang, Jette Kristoffersen, Johanna Mesch
Venue:
SignLang
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
53–60
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.signlang-1.9
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Filhol. 2020. Elicitation and Corpus of Spontaneous Sign Language Discourse Representation Diagrams. In Proceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives, pages 53–60, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Elicitation and Corpus of Spontaneous Sign Language Discourse Representation Diagrams (Filhol, SignLang 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.signlang-1.9.pdf