European Science Foundation Network INTERSIGN:
Workshop on Text Corpora and Tagging (syntax and morphology),
Certosa di Pontignano (Siena, Italy) March 12-15 1999

Overview of tools: some notes taken during the final session

In her presentation, Penny Boyes-Braem presented a "wish list" for programs used for sign language data bases. During the final discussion of multimedia data bases the participants added more features to "Penny’s wish list" and specified the features of some tools that people had already some experience with (foot note 1). The table below sums up the information provided by the participants during that session (notes taken by Anne Baker) and a few additions have been made later. Comments, questions, additions, corrections etc. are welcome!

	Excel	MediaTagger	syncWRITER	SignStream
	Mac, PC	Mac	Mac	Mac
Feature
video	no	yes	yes	yes
automatic timing info	no	yes	yes	yes
queries	yes	yes, more sophisticated	complicated (Apple Script)	not yet
charts	yes	export to Excel, not back	to Excel	?no
links	?	? Filemaker	to Filemaker etc.	no
specialist fonts	yes, also in queries	yes in transcription, ? in queries	yes	no, told could, but not clear how
flexible (add new info)	yes	yes	yes	yes but
vertical/ horizontal	yes	n.a.	n.a.	no
print out	yes	screen or export to Excel	yes	only screen prints
availability	commercially available	not being promoted (foot note 2)	commercially available from med-i-bit (EUR 425)	available by down-loading from website ($25)
support/up-date		no	no/?	online discussion site; support from authors (but as project)

1) SignFont, SignPhon and SignWriting (www adresses below) were not included in the discussion, simply because the participants did not know enough about them.

2) Contact Anne Senghas to be put in contact with distributor at MPI. - EUDICO (European Distributed Corpus) new version of software, will be more promoted (Mac and PC).

Some additional points:

• all tools are document based (but can be used with database);
  all capable of handling large corpora
  
  
• moving spatial map not available on any product; wanted as continuous mapping to get a three dimensional locationtagging of video image; SignStream uses discrete locations; cannot link categories in queries - e.g. left of left
  
  
• database integration
  while transcribing and using glosses, warning that a gloss is not in database; SignStream and MediaTagger can only do this for closed categories such as N, V etc. and not for open categories such as glosses;
  
  Searching for chunks should be possible so that not every document has to be searched; now semi-manually; the system must ensure that you are consistent.
  
  Multi-user databases - SyncWriter and Filemaker can be checked every so often but not done automatically ; need to happen on-line to keep integration of multi-users.
  
  
• from transcript to database and vice versa: no for all programs in the table

???What does the following refer to?
Excel - limited
SyW - limited
SS - no
MT - can go from transcript to database in limited way

Sites:

AusWrite
http://www.xchange.anarki.net/~freedom/

HamNoSys
//Projects/Notation.html

Media Tagger
http://www.mpi.nl/world/tg/CAVA/mt/MTandDB.html

SignFont
http://members.home.net/dnewkirk/signfont/

SignPhon
http://www.leidenuniv.nl/hil/sign-lang/signphon2.html

Sign transcription system, Berkeley Sign Language Acquisition Project
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/sign.pdf

SignStream
http://www.bu.edu/asllrp/SignStream/

syncWRITER
//Projects/syncWRITER.html

SignWriting
http://www.signwriting.org/

List of workshop papers