Making Sign Language Corpora Comparable: A Study of Palm-Up and Throw-Away in Polish Sign Language, German Sign Language, and Russian Sign Language

Anna Kuder


Abstract
This paper is primarily devoted to describing the preparation phase of a large-scale comparative study based on naturalistic linguistic data drawn from multiple sign language corpora. To provide an example, I am using my current project on manual gestural elements in Polish Sign Language, German Sign Language, and Russian Sign Language. The paper starts with a description of the reasons behind undertaking this project. Then, I describe the scope of my study, which is focused on two manual elements present in all three mentioned sign languages: palm-up and throw-away; and the three corpora which are my data sources. This is followed by a presentation of the steps taken in the initial stages of the project in order to make the data comparable. Those steps are: choosing the adequate data samples from all three corpora, gathering all data within the chosen software, and creating an annotation schema that builds on the annotations already present in all three corpora. Even though the project is still underway, and the annotation process is ongoing, preliminary discussions about the nature of the analysed manual activities are presented based on the initial annotations for the sake of evaluating the created annotation schema. I conclude the paper with some remarks about the performance of the employed methodology.
Anthology ID:
2022.signlang-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie A. Hochgesang, Jette Kristoffersen, Johanna Mesch, Marc Schulder
Venue:
SignLang
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
110–117
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.signlang-1.17
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Kuder. 2022. Making Sign Language Corpora Comparable: A Study of Palm-Up and Throw-Away in Polish Sign Language, German Sign Language, and Russian Sign Language. In Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources, pages 110–117, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Making Sign Language Corpora Comparable: A Study of Palm-Up and Throw-Away in Polish Sign Language, German Sign Language, and Russian Sign Language (Kuder, SignLang 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.signlang-1.17.pdf