Louisa Willoughby


2022

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Integrating Auslan Resources into the Language Data Commons of Australia
River Tae Smith | Louisa Willoughby | Trevor Johnston
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources

This paper describes a project to secure Auslan (Australian Sign Language) resources within a national language data network called the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA). The resources are Auslan Signbank, a web-based multi-media dictionary, and the Auslan Corpus, a collection of video recordings of the language being used in various contexts with time-aligned ELAN annotation files. We aim to make these resources accessible to the language community, encourage community participation in the curation of the data, and facilitate and extend their uses in language teaching and linguistic research. The software platforms of both resources will be made compatible with other LDaCA resources; and the two will also be aggregated and linked so that (i) users of the dictionary can view attested corpus examples for an entry; and (ii) users of the corpus can instantly view the dictionary entry for an already glossed sign to check phonological, lexical and grammatical information about it, and/or to ensure that the correct annotation gloss (aka ‘ID-gloss’) for a sign token has been chosen. This will enhance additions to annotations in the Auslan Corpus, entries in Auslan Signbank and the integrity of research based on both.