A fundamental problem in the creation of signed language corpora is lemmatisation. Lemmatisation—the classification or identification of related word forms under a single label or lemma (the equivalent of headwords or headsigns in a dictionary)—is central to the process of corpus creation. The reason is that signed language corpora—as with all modern linguistic corpora—need to be machine-readable and this means that sign annotations should not only be informed by linguistic theory but also that tags appended to these annotations should be used consistently and systematically. In addition, a corpus must also be well documented (i.e., with accurate and relevant metadata) and representative of the language community (i.e., of relevant registers and sociolinguistic). All this requires dedicated technology (e.g., ELAN), standards and protocols (e.g., IMDI metadata descriptors), and transparent and agreed grammatical tags (e.g., grammatical class labels). However, it also requires the identification of lemmata and this presupposes the unique identification of sign forms. In other words, a successful corpus project presupposes the availability of a reference dictionary or lexical database to facilitate lemma identification and consistency in lemmatisation. Without lemmatisation a collection of recordings with various related appended annotation files will not be able to be used as a true linguistic corpus as the counting, sorting, tagging. etc. of types and tokens is rendered virtually impossible. This presentation draws on the Australian experience of corpus creation to show how a dictionary in the form of a computerized lexical database needs to be created and integrated into any signed language corpus project. Plans for the creation of new signed language corpora will be seriously flawed if they do not take this into account.
@inproceedings{johnston:08031:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Johnston, Trevor},
title = {Corpus linguistics and signed languages: no lemmata, no corpus},
pages = {82--87},
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/08031.pdf}
}
