IPSL: A Database of Iconicity Patterns in Sign Languages. Creation and Use

Kimmelman, Vadim | Klezovich, Anna | Moroz, George

Volume:: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)
Venue:: Miyazaki, Japan
Date:: 7 to 12 May 2018
Pages:: 4230–4234
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
ACL ID:: L18-1667
ISBN:: 979-10-95546-00-9

Content Categories

Languages:: American Sign Language, British Sign Language, Czech Sign Language, German Sign Language, Estonian Sign Language, Greek Sign Language, Icelandic Sign Language, Libras, Italian Sign Language, Spanish Sign Language, French Sign Language, Latvian Sign Language, Lithuanian Sign Language, Polish Sign Language, Portuguese Sign Language, Russian Sign Language, Romanian Sign Language, Swedish Sign Language, Turkish Sign Language
Corpora:: IPSL, Spreadthesign

Abstract

We created the first large-scale database of signs annotated according to various parameters of iconicity. The signs represent concrete concepts in seven semantic fields in nineteen sign languages; 1542 signs in total. Each sign was annotated with respect to the type of form-image association, the presence of iconic location and movement, personification, and with respect to whether the sign depicts a salient part of the concept. We also created a website: https://sl-iconicity.shinyapps.io/iconicity patterns/ with several visualization tools to represent the data from the database. It is possible to visualize iconic properties of separate concepts or iconic properties of semantic fields on the map of the world, and to build graphs representing iconic patterns for selected semantic fields. A preliminary analysis of the data shows that iconicity patterns vary across semantic fields and across languages. The database and the website can be used to further study a variety of theoretical questions related to iconicity in sign languages.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Vadim Kimmelman, Anna Klezovich, George Moroz. 2018. IPSL: A Database of Iconicity Patterns in Sign Languages. Creation and Use. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), pages 4230–4234, Miyazaki, Japan. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{kimmelman-etal-2018-ipsl:lrec,
  author    = {Kimmelman, Vadim and Klezovich, Anna and Moroz, George},
  title     = {{IPSL}: A Database of Iconicity Patterns in Sign Languages. Creation and Use},
  pages     = {4230--4234},
  editor    = {Calzolari, Nicoletta and Choukri, Khalid and Cieri, Christopher and Declerck, Thierry and Goggi, Sara and Hasida, Koiti and Isahara, Hitoshi and Maegaard, Bente and Mariani, Joseph and Mazo,  H{\'e}l{\`e}ne and Moreno, Asuncion and Odijk, Jan and Piperidis, Stelios and Tokunaga, Takenobu},
  booktitle = {11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2018)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Miyazaki, Japan},
  day       = {7--12},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2018},
  isbn      = {979-10-95546-00-9},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/L18-1667}
}