What Corpus-based Research on Negation in Auslan and PJM Tells Us about Building and Using Sign Language Corpora

Kuder, Anna | Filipczak, Joanna | Mostowski, Piotr | Rutkowski, Paweł | Johnston, Trevor

Volume:: Proceedings of the LREC2018 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community
Venue:: Miyazaki, Japan
Date:: 12 May 2018
Pages:: 101–106
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
License:: CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:: 18033
ISBN:: 979-10-95546-01-6

Content Categories

Projects:: Korpus PJM Project
Languages:: Auslan, Polish Sign Language
Corpora:: Auslan Corpus, Korpus PJM

Abstract

In this paper, we would like to discuss our current work on negation in Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and PJM (Polish Sign Language, polski język migowy) as an example of experience in using sign language corpus data for research purposes. We describe how we prepared the data for two detailed empirical studies, given similarities and differences between the Australian and Polish corpus projects. We present our findings on negation in both languages, which turn out to be surprisingly similar. At the same time, what the two corpus studies show seems to be quite different from many previous descriptions of sign language negation found in the literature. Some remarks on how to effectively plan and carry out the annotation process of sign language texts are outlined at the end of the present paper, as they might be helpful to other researchers working on designing a corpus. Our work leads to two main conclusions: (1) in many cases, usage data may not be easily reconciled with intuitions and assumptions about how sign languages function and what their grammatical characteristics are like, (2) in order to obtain representative and reliable data from large-scale corpora one needs to plan and carry out the annotation process very thoroughly.

Keywords

Experiences in building sign language corpora
Experiences from linguistic research using corpora

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Anna Kuder, Joanna Filipczak, Piotr Mostowski, Paweł Rutkowski, Trevor Johnston. 2018. What Corpus-based Research on Negation in Auslan and PJM Tells Us about Building and Using Sign Language Corpora. In Proceedings of the LREC2018 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community, pages 101–106, Miyazaki, Japan. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{kuder:18033:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Kuder, Anna and Filipczak, Joanna and Mostowski, Piotr and Rutkowski, Pawe{\l} and Johnston, Trevor},
  title     = {What Corpus-based Research on Negation in {Auslan} and {PJM} Tells Us about Building and Using Sign Language Corpora},
  pages     = {101--106},
  editor    = {Bono, Mayumi and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna and Osugi, Yutaka},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2018} 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community},
  maintitle = {11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2018)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Miyazaki, Japan},
  day       = {12},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2018},
  isbn      = {979-10-95546-01-6},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/18033.pdf}
}