Japanese Sign Language Colloquial Corpus
The Japanese Sign Language Colloquial Corpus is a collection of movie clips from JSLJapanese Sign Language signers. Construction of the corpus started in April 2011; filming took place from May to July 2012.
Signers were recorded in pairs and each session lasted 1.5 hours. Three HD cameras were used for filming, one for each signer and one for a total view. Signers were sitting opposite each other in front of a blue background. Data was collected via interviews, dialogues and lexical elicitation tasks. The tasks were led by two field workers using the local signs.
The research and hence also the annotation scheme focus not only on theretical issues related to grammar and linguistics, but also to pragmatic and interactional phenomenas.
| Language | Japanese Sign Language |
|---|---|
| Size |
40 hours of recording
140 video clips 27371 tokens |
| Participants |
120 participants
Deaf 20–80 years 66 male, 54 female From 7 prefectures: Gunma, Nara, Nagasaki, Fukuoka, Ishikawa, Toyama, Ibaraki |
| Metadata Format | information not available |
| Translation | Japanese, size unknown |
| Annotation |
80 files (60%) with basic annotation
See http://research.nii.ac.jp/jsl-corpus/research/data/manual/manual.html |
| Data Format | ELAN |
| Licence |
JSL Colloquial Corpus licence 
|
| Access |
Public access to recordings of dialogue and elicitation of Nara and Gumma via browsable homepage
Restricted access to interview recordings of Nara and Gumma and all recordings of Fukuoka, Ishikawa, Toyama, Ibaraki More content publicly available on Japanese webpage only |
| Webpages |
Project page with Dataset: http://research.nii.ac.jp/jsl-corpus/public/en/index.html
Researcher portal: http://research.nii.ac.jp/jsl-corpus/research/en/index.html
|
| Institution | Bono Lab |
| Publications |
Bono et al. (2014)
Bono et al. (2020) For further references, see http://research.nii.ac.jp/~bono/en/research/index.html
|
Cite as
HP name: Corpus Project in Colloquial Japanese Sign Language
URL: http://research.nii.ac.jp/jsl-corpus/public/en/index.html
Paper: Bono, Mayumi., Kikuchi, Kouhei., Cibulka, Paul., and Osugi, Yutaka. (2014) Colloquial Corpus of Japanese Sign Language: A Design of Language Resources for Observing Sign Language Conversations. Proc. of The 9th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pp.1898-1904. (May 26-31, Reykjavik, Iceland)
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/278_Paper.pdf
Common tasks used in this corpus
Hide/Show tasks
| Task | Lexical elicitation |
|---|---|
| # recordings – open access | 20 |
| # recordings – restricted access | 0 |
| Data available |
http://research.nii.ac.jp/jsl-corpus/public/en/nara/shuwa/
http://research.nii.ac.jp/jsl-corpus/public/en/gumma/shuwa/
|
| Task | Sylvester and Tweety |
| # recordings – open access | 40 |
| # recordings – restricted access | 0 |
| Data available |
http://research.nii.ac.jp/jsl-corpus/public/en/nara/anime/
http://research.nii.ac.jp/jsl-corpus/public/en/gumma/anime/
|
References
Primary references
- Mayumi Bono, Kouhei Kikuchi, Paul Cibulka, Yutaka Osugi (2014). "A Colloquial Corpus of Japanese Sign Language: Linguistic Resources for Observing Sign Language Conversations". In: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014) (Reykjavik, Iceland). Ed. by Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis. Paris, France: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 1898-1904. ISBN: 978-2-9517408-8-4. ACL: L14-1253.
- Mayumi Bono, Rui Sakaida, Tomohiro Okada, Yusuke Miyao (2020). "Utterance-Unit Annotation for the JSL Dialogue Corpus: Toward a Multimodal Approach to Corpus Linguistics". In: Proceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives (Marseille, France). Ed. by Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie A. Hochgesang, Jette Kristoffersen, Johanna Mesch. Paris, France: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 13-20. ISBN: 979-10-95546-54-2. ACL: 2020.signlang-1.3.
This entry was last modified on 7 March 2025.