The SMILE Continuous DSGS Corpus: A Resource for Longitudinal Exploration of Continuous Swiss German Sign Language

Alessia Battisti, Katja Tissi, Sandra Sidler-Miserez, Sarah Ebling


Abstract
This paper presents the SMILE Continuous DSGS Corpus, a longitudinal dataset that allows for investigating how hearing adults acquire Swiss German Sign Language as a second language. It includes recordings of sign language learners and native signer controls collected at four points over a period of 18 months and annotated for manual and non-manual components, errors, and sentence-level acceptability. The resource provides high-quality, synchronized video suitable for both linguistic and automatic sign language processing research, for example, supporting studies of interlanguage development and training of automatic sign language recognition models. We present here an exploratory analysis of the learner subcorpus using Bayesian mixed-effects modeling. The corpus and accompanying annotations are available for research purposes under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Anthology ID:
2026.signlang-1.3
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:
17–30
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-signlang-03
DOI:
10.63317/3x4j9f32vbb9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alessia Battisti, Katja Tissi, Sandra Sidler-Miserez, and Sarah Ebling. 2026. The SMILE Continuous DSGS Corpus: A Resource for Longitudinal Exploration of Continuous Swiss German Sign Language. In Proceedings of the LREC 2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 17–30, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
The SMILE Continuous DSGS Corpus: A Resource for Longitudinal Exploration of Continuous Swiss German Sign Language (Battisti et al., SignLang 2026)
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