In this paper, we discuss the theoretical, sociolinguistic, methodological and technical objectives and issues of the French Creagest Project (2007-2012) in setting up, documenting and annotating a large corpus of adult and child French Sign Language (LSF) and of natural gestural language. The main objective of this ANR-funded research project is to set up a collaborative web-based platform for the study of semiogenesis in LSF (French Sign Language), i.e. the study of emerging structures and signs, be they used by Deaf adult signers, Deaf children, or even by Deaf and hearing subjects in interaction. In section 2, we address theoretical and practical issues, emphasizing the outstanding features of the Creagest Project. In section 3, we deal with methodological issues for data collection. Finally, in section 4, we examine technical aspects of LSF video data editing and corpus annotation, in the perspective of setting up a corpus-based formalized description of LSF.
@inproceedings{balvet-etal-2010-creagest:lrec,
author = {Balvet, Antonio and Courtin, Cyril and Boutet, Dominique and Cuxac, Christian and Fusellier-Souza, Ivani and Garcia, Brigitte and L'Huillier, Marie-Th{\'e}r{\`e}se and Sallandre, Marie-Anne},
title = {The Creagest Project: a Digitized and Annotated Corpus for {F}rench {S}ign {L}anguage ({LSF}) and Natural Gestural Languages},
pages = {469--475},
editor = {Calzolari, Nicoletta and Choukri, Khalid and Maegaard, Bente and Mariani, Joseph and Odijk, Jan and Piperidis, Stelios and Rosner, Mike and Tapias, Daniel},
booktitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Valletta, Malta},
day = {17--23},
month = may,
year = {2010},
isbn = {978-2-9517408-6-0},
language = {english},
url = {http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/356_Paper.pdf}
}