One requirement of a sign language corpus is that it should be machine-readable, but only a systematic approach to annotation that involves lemmatisation of the sign language glosses can make this possible at the present time. Such lemmatisation involves grouping morphological and phonological variants together into a single lemma, so that all related variants of a sign can be identified and analysed as a single sign. This lemmatisation process is made more straightforward by the existence of a comprehensive lexical database, as in the case for Australian Sign Language (Auslan). When annotation of data collected as part of the British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus Project began, no such lexical database for BSL existed. Therefore, a lemmatised BSL lexical database was created concurrently during annotation of the BSL Corpus data. As part of ongoing work by the Deafness Cognition & Language Research Centre, this lexical database is being developed into an online BSL dictionary, BSL SignBank. This paper describes the adaptation of the Auslan lexical database into a BSL lexical database, and the current development of this lexical database into BSL SignBank.
@inproceedings{cormier:12033:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Cormier, Kearsy and Fenlon, Jordan and Johnston, Trevor and Rentelis, Ramas and Schembri, Adam and Rowley, Katherine and Adam, Robert and Woll, Bencie},
title = {From Corpus to Lexical Database to Online Dictionary: Issues in annotation of the {BSL} Corpus and the Development of {BSL} {SignBank}},
pages = {7--12},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2012} 5th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus and Lexicon},
maintitle = {8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2012)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
day = {27},
month = may,
year = {2012},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/12033.pdf}
}
| Fenlon, Jordan | Johnston, Trevor