The French Sign Language (LSF) was banned in 1880 from all teaching institutions. From then on, it continued expanding in an uncoordinated way throughout special schools. In 1991, a new French law allowed deaf people to choose a bilingual education (French and sign language), and since February 2005 each school is required to integrate every devoted child who wishes it, no matter his handicap. All public websites must also become accessible. With this new context, the LSF grows using regional differences, and users invent new signs to translate new concepts. However, the sign language cannot count on traditional media to spread out new expressions or words, since it is nor spoken nor written. Therefore the sign vocabulary differs depending on geographical and social situations, furthermore if the concept is specific and elaborate. The website LexiqueLSF wishes to propose users a contributing and efficient tool, allowing a large diffusion of new signs and concepts. A short analysis of the existing supports will lead us to present the main issues and to describe precisely the technical and linguistic solutions we chose, as well as some of the problems we met. This website must absolutely have a relevant and sharp classifying system, must be accessible to everyone, and offer new entries to satisfy all users. Likewise, all the elements composing the website should be considered as a concept in order to imagine complete accessibility to deaf people, and not only to blind people. We do not wish to make a simple dictionary. Our aim is to allow exchanges between users, to encourage them to invent and spread neologisms, and to make sure that the represented concepts are clear and understandable. Publishing a new notion requires to create a number of descriptors (in french and in sign language, illustrations, examples...) and to relate this notion to others already existing (opposite or similar concepts...). Each new sign proposed will be completely described, therefore it can easily be appropriated. A reliable, but not compulsory, validation system will guarantee only serious suggestions. Our production is thus very different from already existing paper or digital dictionaries, containing only everyday life vocabulary and almost no definitions, nor use examples. The best ones sort words according to the space location and configuration of the sign, but do not recognise morphological variations. Let us also observe that these dictionaries are not "bilingual" since they are accessible only to french speakers. According to C. Cuxac 2000, two discursive enunciation strategies co-exist in LSF: through the canal leading from the vision to the sign, you can either choose to say with or without showing. Meaning you can either "make see" your experience with a visually accurate sequence of signs, or you can use the standard signs having no physical resemblance with the experience you are describing. Referring to this theory, our research supposes to organise into a hierarchy all linguistic parameters used in signs as meaning elements.
@inproceedings{moreau:08021:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Moreau, C{\'e}dric and Mascret, Bruno},
title = {{LexiqueLSF}},
pages = {138--140},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Thoutenhoofd, Ernst D. and Zwitserlood, Inge},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2008} 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora},
maintitle = {6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2008)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Marrakech, Morocco},
day = {1},
month = jun,
year = {2008},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/08021.pdf}
}