Phonetics of Negative Headshake in Russian Sign Language: A Small-Scale Corpus Study

Anastasia Chizhikova, Vadim Kimmelman


Abstract
We analyzed negative headshake found in the online corpus of Russian Sign Language. We found that negative headshake can co-occur with negative manual signs, although most of these signs are not accompanied by it. We applied OpenFace, a Computer Vision toolkit, to extract head rotation measurements from video recordings, and analyzed the headshake in terms of the number of peaks (turns), the amplitude of the turns, and their frequency. We find that such basic phonetic measurements of headshake can be extracted using a combination of manual annotation and Computer Vision, and can be further used in comparative research across constructions and sign languages.
Anthology ID:
2022.signlang-1.5
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:
29–36
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.signlang-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anastasia Chizhikova and Vadim Kimmelman. 2022. Phonetics of Negative Headshake in Russian Sign Language: A Small-Scale Corpus Study. In Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources, pages 29–36, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Phonetics of Negative Headshake in Russian Sign Language: A Small-Scale Corpus Study (Chizhikova & Kimmelman, SignLang 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.signlang-1.5.pdf
Code
 nastyachizhikova/negative_headshake_phonetics_rsl