Exploring Aspects of Spontaneous Signing in the DGS Corpus

Maria Kopf, Reiner Konrad, Gabriele Langer, Marc Schulder, Lutz König


Abstract
Most use of sign language is spontaneous, unplanned, embedded in a one-to-one situation and transient. General sign language corpora aim at such naturalistic data. Thus it can be expected that they include phenomena of spontaneous language similar to the ones described for spontaneous speech in vocal languages: that is, (dis)fluencies such as pauses, hesitations, errors, false starts and repairs as well as discourse markers. In this paper we explore which of the known phenomena of spontaneous language from previous research on vocal and sign languages could be identified in the DGS Corpus using the annotations at hand. We describe our search strategies, consider additional annotation tiers for spontaneous language, and provide examples for the phenomena identified.
Anthology ID:
2026.signlang-1.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie A. Hochgesang, Johanna Mesch, Marc Schulder
Venues:
SignLang | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
262–274
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-signlang-28
DOI:
10.63317/5bd5xeb3kh7u
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maria Kopf, Reiner Konrad, Gabriele Langer, Marc Schulder, and Lutz König. 2026. Exploring Aspects of Spontaneous Signing in the DGS Corpus. In Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 262–274, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Aspects of Spontaneous Signing in the DGS Corpus (Kopf et al., SignLang 2026)
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