Intersign Workshop on Sign Language Lexical Databases

Status Quo

Data on sign language are collected nearly in all European countries. Comparative investigations or multilingual applications, however, are difficult to realize, because the databases constructed are incompatible, in the information they contain (what information is registered? are sl data transcribed?) and in the record and field structure (how is the information structured?). The problem arises if we do want cooperation and data exchange across national borders and how we can manage to achieve this. If we indeed want multilingual dictionaries, then common formats and data sharing becomes important (for comparative aspects, statistics, search functions etc.). These aspects will be discussed in the workshop.

Databases description criteria

• types of information registered
• structure of the database (relational, flat)
• kind of data record formats
• number and type of fields
• transcription method(s) used
• number of records entered up to now

Evaluation

The demonstrations or descriptions of the databases will be evaluated according to the central focus of InterSign, i.e. the criterion of data exchange for future cooperation. In the discussion of the samples the following questions might play a role:

Discussion points (databases)

• is a common European format for lexical databases desirable?
• what uses are there for a common European database format?
• is a data exchange desirable at all and for whom?
• under which conditions are you willing to share your data with other researchers?
• are you planning to participate in multilingual dictionaries?
• which transcription conventions for sl data did you follow?
• are your data principally convertable to other formats?
• is it possible to provide routines for automatically converting the data into another format?

Software demonstration criteria

• description of the functionality provided by the software
• demonstration of the user interface of the software
• description of the underlying database format

Discussion points (software)

• what functions of the software should be altered?
• what functions of the software should be enhanced?

List of workshop papers