Including Non-Manual Markers in Studies of American Sign Language Dialogue

Jillian Stebbins, Amber Hamilton, Emily Nover, Stephanie Patterson, Allison Fitch, Patrick Boudreault, Raja Kushalnagar, Cecilia O Alm


Abstract
Language technology resources are limited for signed languages. In order to improve these technologies, large amounts of labeled language data stored in annotated corpora are necessary. Many existing annotated corpora in American Sign Language (ASL) do not include non-manual markers (NMMs), i.e., language features that do not involve the hands. This work underscores the importance of including NMMs in sign language research by describing their plurifunctional nature in signed conversation, specifying their link to sign language prosody, examining the current state of ASL corpus research, and recommending a systematized method of annotation which captures the critical but complex variations in NMM production in ASL.
Anthology ID:
2026.mint-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Esam Ghaleb, Ece Takmaz, Diego Frassinelli, Bulat Khaertdinov, Raquel Fernández, Zerrin Yumak, Asli Ozyurek
Venues:
MINT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
89–95
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mint-1.10/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jillian Stebbins, Amber Hamilton, Emily Nover, Stephanie Patterson, Allison Fitch, Patrick Boudreault, Raja Kushalnagar, and Cecilia O Alm. 2026. Including Non-Manual Markers in Studies of American Sign Language Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue, pages 89–95, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Including Non-Manual Markers in Studies of American Sign Language Dialogue (Stebbins et al., MINT 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mint-1.10.pdf