@inproceedings{battisti:24019:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Battisti, Alessia and Tissi, Katja and Sidler-Miserez, Sandra and Ebling, Sarah}, title = {Advancing Annotation for Continuous Data in {Swiss} {German} {Sign} {Language}}, pages = {1--12}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC-COLING} 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources}, maintitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)}, publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}}, address = {Torino, Italy}, day = {25}, month = may, year = {2024}, isbn = {978-2-493814-30-2}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24019.html}, abstract = {This paper presents a transcription and annotation scheme introduced specifically for L1 and L2 continuous data of Swiss German Sign Language, with potential applicability to other sign languages. The scheme includes a novel way of annotating linguistic errors in L2 data, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of sign language learning. An initial validation approach is outlined, revealing challenges and underscoring the necessity for a more comprehensive method for validating sign language (learner) data. The paper emphasizes the overarching goal of achieving interoperability among sign language corpora and research groups, particularly in advancing sign language data validation techniques.} } @inproceedings{battisti:24025:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Battisti, Alessia and van den Bold, Emma and G{\"o}hring, Anne and Holzknecht, Franz and Ebling, Sarah}, title = {Person Identification from Pose Estimates in Sign Language}, pages = {13--25}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC-COLING} 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources}, maintitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)}, publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}}, address = {Torino, Italy}, day = {25}, month = may, year = {2024}, isbn = {978-2-493814-30-2}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24025.html}, abstract = {Sign language recognition models require extensive training data. Effectively anonymizing such data remains a complex endeavor due to the crucial role of facial features. While pose estimation techniques have traditionally been considered a means of yielding anonymized data, the findings reported in this paper challenge this assumption: We conducted a study involving Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) users, presenting them with pose estimates from DSGS video samples. The participants' task was to identify the signers' language levels and identities from skeletal representations. Our findings reveal that the extent to which sign language users were capable of recognizing familiar signers depended on their language level, with deaf experts achieving the highest accuracy. We demonstrate that an automatic classifier obtains comparable results in multi-label language level recognition (F1=0.64) and person identification (F1=0.31). This emphasizes the need to reconsider the fundamentals of video anonymization towards guaranteeing sign language users' privacy.} } @inproceedings{picron:24021:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Picron, Frankie and Van Landuyt, Davy and Omardeen, Rehana and Efthimiou, Eleni and Wolfe, Rosalee and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Goulas, Theodoros and Tismer, Christian and Kopf, Maria and Hanke, Thomas}, title = {The {EASIER} Mobile Application and Avatar End-User Evaluation Methodology}, pages = {276--281}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC-COLING} 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources}, maintitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)}, publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}}, address = {Torino, Italy}, day = {25}, month = may, year = {2024}, isbn = {978-2-493814-30-2}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24021.html}, abstract = {Here we report on the methodological approach adopted for the end-user evaluation studies carried out during the lifecycle of the EASIER project, focusing on the project's mobile app and avatar technologies. Evaluation was performed in two cycles and involved both deaf signers' and hearing sign language (SL) experts' groups from five SLs to provide user feedback, which served as a reference to base the next development steps of the respective EASIER components. With this goal in mind, priorities were (i) to exploit information gathered via focus group discussions after (ii) presenting evaluators with the technological components and related questionnaires fully accessible to signers to maximize feedback and underline the importance of user involvement in the development of the technology.} } @inproceedings{schulder:24034:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Schulder, Marc and Bigeard, Sam and Kopf, Maria and Hanke, Thomas and Kuder, Anna and W{\'o}jcicka, Joanna and Mesch, Johanna and Bj{\"o}rkstrand, Thomas and Vacalopoulou, Anna and Vasilaki, Kyriaki and Goulas, Theodoros and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Efthimiou, Eleni}, title = {Signs and Synonymity: Continuing Development of the {Multilingual} {Sign} {Language} {Wordnet}}, pages = {343--353}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC-COLING} 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources}, maintitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)}, publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}}, address = {Torino, Italy}, day = {25}, month = may, year = {2024}, isbn = {978-2-493814-30-2}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24034.html}, abstract = {The Multilingual Sign Language Wordnet is the first publicly available wordnet resource for sign languages. It is a growing multilingual resource providing data for eight sign languages to date. During the initial phase of its creation, the focus lay on producing the infrastructure to support various languages and to produce initial sets of content for them. This article represents the start of the second phase, in which the focus is moved to establishing overlapping coverage across the different sign languages. Building on the data produced so far, a new feature to assist annotation is introduced which leverages established partial synonymy between signs (inter- and cross-lingually) to discover likely additional synonymies. Other improvements to the annotation interface and workflow build directly on the experiences from the first phase. Working with the updated annotation interface, new data is produced for Polish Sign Language, Greek Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language.} } @inproceedings{jiang-etal-2024-swisssli:lrec, author = {Jiang, Zifan and G{\"o}hring, Anne and Moryossef, Amit and Sennrich, Rico and Ebling, Sarah}, title = {{SwissSLi}: the Multi-parallel Sign Language Corpus for {Switzerland}}, pages = {15448--15456}, editor = {Calzolari, Nicoletta and Kan, Min-Yen and Hoste, Veronique and Lenci, Alessandro and Sakti, Sakriani and Xue, Nianwen}, booktitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)}, publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}}, address = {Torino, Italy}, day = {20--25}, month = may, year = {2024}, isbn = {978-2-493814-10-4}, language = {english}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1342}, abstract = {In this work, we introduce SwissSLi, the first sign language corpus that contains parallel data of all three Swiss sign languages, namely Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS), French Sign Language of Switzerland (LSF-CH), and Italian Sign Language of Switzerland (LIS-CH). The data underlying this corpus originates from television programs in three spoken languages: German, French, and Italian. The programs have for the most part been translated into sign language by deaf translators, resulting in a unique, up to six-way multi-parallel dataset between spoken and sign languages. We describe and release the sign language videos and spoken language subtitles as well as the overall statistics and some derivatives of the raw material. These derived components include cropped videos, pose estimation, phrase/sign-segmented videos, and sentence-segmented subtitles, all of which facilitate downstream tasks such as sign language transcription (glossing) and machine translation. The corpus is publicly available on the SWISSUbase data platform for research purposes only under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.} } @inproceedings{dimou:70021:sltat:lrec, author = {Dimou, Athanasia-Lida and Papavassiliou, Vassilis and McDonald, John C. and Goulas, Theodoros and Vasilaki, Kyriaki and Vacalopoulou, Anna and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Efthimiou, Eleni and Wolfe, Rosalee}, title = {Signing Avatar Performance Evaluation within {EASIER} Project}, pages = {39--44}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and McDonald, John C. and Shterionov, Dimitar and Wolfe, Rosalee}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives}, maintitle = {13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2022)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Marseille, France}, day = {24}, month = jun, year = {2022}, isbn = {979-10-95546-82-5}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/2022.sltat-1.6.html}, abstract = {The direct involvement of deaf users in the development and evaluation of signing avatars is imperative to achieve legibility and raise trust among synthetic signing technology consumers. A paradigm of constructive cooperation between researchers and the deaf community is the EASIER project , where user driven design and technology development have already started producing results. One major goal of the project is the direct involvement of sign language (SL) users at every stage of development of the project's signing avatar. As developers wished to consider every parameter of SL articulation including affect and prosody in developing the EASIER SL representation engine, it was necessary to develop a steady communication channel with a wide public of SL users who may act as evaluators and can provide guidance throughout research steps, both during the project's end-user evaluation cycles and beyond. To this end, we have developed a questionnaire-based methodology, which enables researchers to reach signers of different SL communities on-line and collect their guidance and preferences on all aspects of SL avatar animation that are under study. In this paper, we report on the methodology behind the application of the EASIER evaluation framework for end-user guidance in signing avatar development as it is planned to address signers of four SLs -Greek Sign Language (GSL), French Sign Language (LSF), German Sign Language (DGS) and Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS)- during the first project evaluation cycle. We also briefly report on some interesting findings from the pilot implementation of the questionnaire with content from the Greek Sign Language (GSL).} } @inproceedings{wolfe:70005:sltat:lrec, author = {Wolfe, Rosalee and McDonald, John C. and Johnson, Ronan and Sturr, Ben and Klinghoffer, Syd and Bonzani, Anthony and Alexander, Andrew and Barnekow, Nicole}, title = {Supporting Mouthing in Signed Languages: New innovations and a proposal for future corpus building}, pages = {125--130}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and McDonald, John C. and Shterionov, Dimitar and Wolfe, Rosalee}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives}, maintitle = {13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2022)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Marseille, France}, day = {24}, month = jun, year = {2022}, isbn = {979-10-95546-82-5}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/2022.sltat-1.19.html}, abstract = {A recurring concern, oft repeated, regarding the quality of signing avatars is the lack of proper facial movements, particularly in actions that involve mouthing. An analysis uncovered three challenges contributing to the problem. The first is a difficulty in devising an algorithmic strategy for generating mouthing due to the rich variety of mouthings in sign language. For example, part or all of a spoken word may be mouthed depending on the sign language, the syllabic structure of the mouthed word, as well as the register of address and discourse setting. The second challenge was technological. Previous efforts to create avatar mouthing have failed to model the timing present in mouthing or have failed to properly model the mouth's appearance. The third challenge is one of usability. Previous editing systems, when they existed, were time-consuming to use. This paper describes efforts to improve avatar mouthing by addressing these challenges, resulting in a new approach for mouthing animation. The paper concludes by proposing an experiment in corpus building using the new approach.} } @inproceedings{ebling-etal-2018-smile:lrec, author = {Ebling, Sarah and Camg{\"o}z, Necati Cihan and Boyes Braem, Penny and Tissi, Katja and Sidler-Miserez, Sandra and Stoll, Stephanie and Hadfield, Simon and Haug, Tobias and Bowden, Richard and Tornay, Sandrine and Razavi, Marzieh and Magimai Doss, Mathew}, title = {{SMILE} {S}wiss {G}erman Sign Language Dataset}, pages = {4221--4229}, 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/L18-1666}, abstract = {Sign language recognition (SLR) involves identifying the form and meaning of isolated signs or sequences of signs. To our knowledge, the combination of SLR and sign language assessment is novel. The goal of an ongoing three-year project in Switzerland is to pioneer an assessment system for lexical signs of Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Geb{\"a}rdensprache, DSGS) that relies on SLR. The assessment system aims to give adult L2 learners of DSGS feedback on the correctness of the manual parameters (handshape, hand position, location, and movement) of isolated signs they produce. In its initial version, the system will include automatic feedback for a subset of a DSGS vocabulary production test consisting of 100 lexical items. To provide the SLR component of the assessment system with sufficient training samples, a large-scale dataset containing videotaped repeated productions of the 100 items of the vocabulary test with associated transcriptions and annotations was created, consisting of data from 11 adult L1 signers and 19 adult L2 learners of DSGS. This paper introduces the dataset, which will be made available to the research community.} } @inproceedings{boyesbraem:16008:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Boyes Braem, Penny and Ebling, Sarah}, title = {Preventing Too Many Cooks from Spoiling the Broth: Some Questions and Suggestions for Collaboration between Projects in {iLex}}, pages = {25--28}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2016} 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining}, maintitle = {10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2016)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Portoro{\v z}, Slovenia}, day = {28}, month = may, year = {2016}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16008.html}, abstract = {Collaborative development of sign language resources is fortunately becoming increasingly common. In the spirit of collaboration, having one shared lexicon for sign language projects is a big advantage. However, this poses challenges to aspects pertaining to consistency of data, privacy of informants, and intellectual property. This contribution points out some problems that arise, especially if the common data comes from projects of different institutions. We describe what we have found to be a sustainable legal framework for our collaborative iLex corpus lexicon, giving an overview of the different kinds of partners involved in the creation and exploitation of a shared iLex corpus lexicon and providing our answers to the questions we faced along with an outlook for the future.} } @inproceedings{ebling:16009:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Ebling, Sarah and Boyes Braem, Penny}, title = {Linking a Web Lexicon of {DSGS} Technical Signs to {iLex}}, pages = {59--62}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2016} 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining}, maintitle = {10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2016)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Portoro{\v z}, Slovenia}, day = {28}, month = may, year = {2016}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16009.html}, abstract = {A website for a lexicon of Swiss German Sign Language equivalents of technical terms was developed several years ago using Flash technology. In the intervening years, the backend research database was migrated from FileMaker to iLex. Here, we report on the development of a web platform that provides access to the same technical signs by extracting the relevant information directly from iLex. This new platform has many advantages: New sets of signs for technical terms can be added or existing ones modified in iLex at any time, and changes are reflected in the web platform upon refreshing the browser. Just as importantly, the new platform can now also be accessed through all major mobile operating systems, as it does not rely on Flash. We descri be how information on the glosses, keywords, videos of citation forms, status, and uses of the technical signs is represented in iLex and how the corresponding web platform was built.} } @inproceedings{koller:16036:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Koller, Oscar and Ney, Hermann and Bowden, Richard}, title = {Automatic Alignment of {HamNoSys} Subunits for Continuous Sign Language Recognition}, pages = {121--128}, editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2016} 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining}, maintitle = {10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2016)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Portoro{\v z}, Slovenia}, day = {28}, month = may, year = {2016}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16036.html}, abstract = {This work presents our recent advances in the field of automatic processing of sign language corpora targeting continuous sign language recognition. We demonstrate how generic annotations at the articulator level, such as HamNoSys, can be exploited to learn subunit classifiers. Specifically, we explore cross-language-subunits of the hand orientation modality, which are trained on isolated signs of publicly available lexicon data sets for Swiss German and Danish sign language and are applied to continuous sign language recognition of the challenging RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather corpus featuring German sign language. We observe a significant reduction in word error rate using this method.} } @inproceedings{ebling:12010:sign-lang:lrec, author = {Ebling, Sarah and Tissi, Katja and Volk, Martin}, title = {Semi-Automatic Annotation of Semantic Relations in a {Swiss} {German} {Sign} {Language} Lexicon}, pages = {31--36}, editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2012} 5th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus and Lexicon}, maintitle = {8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2012)}, publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}}, address = {Istanbul, Turkey}, day = {27}, month = may, year = {2012}, language = {english}, url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/12010.html}, abstract = {We propose an approach to semi-automatically obtaining semantic relations in Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Geb{\"a}rdensprache, DSGS). We use a set of keywords including the gloss to represent each sign. We apply GermaNet, a lexicographic reference database for German annotated with semantic relations. The results show that approximately 60{\%} of the semantic relations found for the German keywords associated with 9000 entries of a DSGS lexicon also apply for DSGS. We use the semantic relations to extract sub-types of the same type within the concept of double glossing (Konrad 2011). We were able to extract 53 sub-type pairs.} }