While the research in automatic Sign Language Processing (SLP) is growing, it has been almost exclusively focused on recognizing lexical signs, whether isolated or within continuous SL production. However, Sign Languages include many other gestural units like iconic structures, which need to be recognized in order to go towards a true SL understanding. In this paper, we propose a newer version of the publicly available SL corpus Dicta-Sign, limited to its French Sign Language part. Involving 16 different signers, this dialogue corpus was produced with very few constraints on the style and content. It includes lexical and non-lexical annotations over 11 hours of video recording, with 35000 manual units. With the aim of stimulating research in SL understanding, we also provide a baseline for the recognition of lexical signs and non-lexical structures on this corpus. A very compact modeling of a signer is built and a Convolutional-Recurrent Neural Network is trained and tested on Dicta-Sign-LSF-v2, with state-of-the-art results, including the ability to detect iconicity in SL production.

In a lot of recent research, attention has been drawn to recognizing sequences of lexical signs in continuous Sign Language corpora, often artificial. However, as SLs are structured through the use of space and iconicity, focusing on lexicon only prevents the field of Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) from extending to Sign Language Understanding and Translation. In this article, we propose a new formulation of the CSLR problem and discuss the possibility of recognizing higher-level linguistic structures in SL videos, like classifier constructions. These structures show much more variability than lexical signs, and are fundamentally different than them in the sense that form and meaning can not be disentangled. Building on the recently published French Sign Language corpus Dicta-Sign-LSF-v2, we discuss the performance and relevance of a simple recurrent neural network trained to recognize illustrative structures.