@inproceedings{dimou:14022:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Dimou, Athanasia-Lida and Goulas, Theodoros and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita},
  title     = {Creation of a multipurpose sign language lexical resource: The {GSL} lexicon database},
  pages     = {37--42},
  editor    = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2014} 6th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Beyond the Manual Channel},
  maintitle = {9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2014)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Reykjavik, Iceland},
  day       = {31},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2014},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/14022.html},
  abstract  = {The GSL lexicon database is the first extensive database of Greek Sign Language (GSL) signs, created on the basis of knowledge derived from the linguistic analysis of natural signers{\'i} data. It incorporates a lemma list that currently includes approximately 6,000 entries and is intended to reach a total number of 10,000 entries within the next two years. The design of the database allows for classification of signs on the basis of their articulation features as regards both manual and non-manual elements. The adopted information management schema accompanying each entry provides for retrieval according to a variety of linguistic properties. In parallel, annotation of the full set of sign articulation features feeds more natural performance of synthetic signing engines and more effective treatment of sign language (SL) data in the framework of sign recognition and natural language processing.}
}

@inproceedings{dubot:14006:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Dubot, R{\'e}mi and Collet, Christophe},
  title     = {A hybrid formalism to parse sign languages},
  pages     = {43--48},
  editor    = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2014} 6th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Beyond the Manual Channel},
  maintitle = {9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2014)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Reykjavik, Iceland},
  day       = {31},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2014},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/14006.html},
  abstract  = {Sign Language (SL) linguistic is dependent on the expensive task of annotating. Some automation is already available for low-level information (eg. body part tracking) and the lexical level has shown significant progresses. The syntactic level lacks annotated corpora as well as complete and consistent models. This article presents a solution for the automatic annotation of SL syntactic elements. It exposes a formalism able to represent both constituency-based and dependency-based models. The first enables the representation of structures one may want to annotate, the second aims at fulfilling the holes of the first. A parser is presented and used to conduct two experiments on the solution. One experiment is on a real corpus, the other is on a synthetic corpus.}
}

@inproceedings{hanke:14029:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Hanke, Thomas},
  title     = {Annotation of mouth activities with {iLex}},
  pages     = {67--70},
  editor    = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2014} 6th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Beyond the Manual Channel},
  maintitle = {9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2014)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Reykjavik, Iceland},
  day       = {31},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2014},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/14029.html},
  abstract  = {Recordings from the DGS-Korpus project with 330 informants confirm that at least for German Sign Language (DGS) you hardly find longer stretches of signing not accompanied by any mouth activity. Independent of whether you consider mouth activity while signing as part of the sign language proper or as a parallel system interacting with sign language to jointly transport meaning, mouth activity is part of the linguistic system used by signers and should be treated as such by any corpus approach. In a purely bottom-up approach an annotation practice used for mouth activities would try to describe the phenomena and leave it to a second step to classify (e.g. between mouthing and mouth gestures) and relate (e.g. to spoken language words). For practical reasons, however, the first step is often skipped, and separate coding systems are applied to what is categorised either as mouthing derived from spoken language or mouth gesture where there is no obvious connection between the meaning expressed and any spoken language words expressing that same meaning. This happens not only for time (=budget) reasons, but also because it is difficult for coders to describe mouth visemes precisely if the sign/mouth combo already suggests what is to be seen on the mouth. While there are established coding procedures to avoid influence as far as possible (like only showing the signer's face, provided video quality is good enough), they make the approach very time-consuming, even if not counting quality assurance measures like inter-transcriber agreement. Some projects undertaken at the IDGS in Hamburg therefore leave it with a spoken-language-driven approach: The mouth activity is classified as either mouth gesture or mouthing, and in the latter case the German word is noted down that a competent DGS signer ``reads'' from the lips, i.e. that word from the set of words to be expected with the co-temporal sign in its context that matches the observation. Standard orthography is used unless there is a substantial deviation. For mouth gestures, holistic labels are used. These two extremes span a whole spectrum of coding approaches that can be used for mouth activities. iLex, the Hamburg sign language annotation workbench, tries to support the whole range of solutions as good as possible. The poster w/ demo shows a variety of approaches actually in use or on the horizon and what iLex has to offer for each of those, from more time-series like systems to those evaluating co-occurrence and semantic relatedness, from novice-friendly decision trees to expert-only modes. Inter-transcriber agreement data on the examples given clearly show that a thorough analysis of data quality has to go beyond such measures.}
}

@inproceedings{dimou:12018:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Dimou, Athanasia-Lida and Pitsikalis, Vassilis and Goulas, Theodoros and Theodorakis, Stavros and Karioris, Panagiotis and Pissaris, Michalis and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Efthimiou, Eleni and Maragos, Petros},
  title     = {A {GSL} continuous phrase corpus: Design and acquisition},
  pages     = {23--26},
  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/12018.html},
  abstract  = {The corpus presented in this article is composed of a limited number of Greek Sign Language (GSL) sentences and was created in order to provide additional data to the already obtained corpus during the first year of the Dicta-Sign project (Matthes et al., 2010). More specifically this corpus intended to serve as the ground upon which a significant part of the recognition process would be tested and evaluated, more precisely, the continuous sign language recognition algorithms developed in the project.
\par
Given the targeted nature of this corpus we present here the constraints as well as the procedure followed in order to obtain it.
\par
The procedure followed for the creation of this corpus, consists of its linguistic design and validation, the studio and hardware acquisition configuration, the implementation and supervision of the acquisition itself and the post-processing and annotation of the obtained data in order to release the set of usable annotated resources. The specific GSL phrase corpus forms the basis for machine learning and training to serve experimentation in the domain of continuous sign language processing and recognition.}
}

@inproceedings{efthimiou:12025:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Glauert, John and Bowden, Richard and Braffort, Annelies and Collet, Christophe and Maragos, Petros and Lefebvre-Albaret, Fran{\c c}ois},
  title     = {Sign Language technologies and resources of the {Dicta-Sign} project},
  pages     = {37--44},
  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/12025.html},
  abstract  = {Here we present the outcomes of Dicta-Sign FP7-ICT project. Dicta-Sign researched ways to enable communication between Deaf individuals through the development of human-computer interfaces (HCI) for Deaf users, by means of Sign Language. It has researched and developed recognition and synthesis engines for sign languages (SLs) that have brought sign recognition and generation technologies significantly closer to authentic signing. In this context, Dicta-Sign has developed several technologies demonstrated via a sign language aware Web 2.0, combining work from the fields of sign language recognition, sign language animation via avatars and sign language resources and language models development, with the goal of allowing Deaf users to make, edit, and review avatar-based sign language contributions online, similar to the way people nowadays make text-based contributions on the Web.}
}

@inproceedings{filhol:12024:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Filhol, Michael and Braffort, Annelies},
  title     = {A Study on Qualification/Naming Structures in Sign Languages},
  pages     = {63--66},
  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/12024.html},
  abstract  = {In the prospect of animating virtual signers, this article addresses the issue of representing Sign, in particular on levels not restricted to the language lexicon. In order to choose and design a suitable model, we illustrate the main steps of our corpus-based methodology for linguistic structure identification and formal description with the example of a specific structure we have named ``qualification/naming''. We also discuss its similarity and difference with other Sign properties described in the literature such as compound signs. Consequently we explain our choice for a description model that does not separate lexicon and grammar in two disjoint levels for virtual signer input.}
}

@inproceedings{hanke:12028:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Hanke, Thomas and Matthes, Silke and Regen, Anja and Worseck, Satu},
  title     = {Where Does a Sign Start and End? Segmentation of Continuous Signing},
  pages     = {69--74},
  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/12028.html},
  abstract  = {There are two basic approaches how to segment continuous signing into individual signs:\begin{itemize}\item A sign starts where the preceding one ends (i.e. fluent signing means there are no gaps between signs)\item Transitional movements between signs do not count as part of either sign. Therefore, usually there are gaps between two signs during which the articulators move from the end of one sign to the beginning of the next.\end{itemize}Both approaches have their pros and cons. However, in the context of the DGS Corpus and the Dicta-Sign project the second approach offers advantages for the subsequent processing. Here we investigate how sensitive this approach is with respect to higher video frame rates.}
}

@inproceedings{matthes:12016:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Matthes, Silke and Hanke, Thomas and Regen, Anja and Storz, Jakob and Worseck, Satu and Efthimiou, Eleni and Dimou, Athanasia-Lida and Braffort, Annelies and Glauert, John and Safar, Eva},
  title     = {{Dicta-Sign} -- Building a Multilingual Sign Language Corpus},
  pages     = {117--122},
  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/12016.html},
  abstract  = {This paper presents the multilingual corpus of four European sign languages compiled in the framework of the Dicta-Sign project. Dicta-Sign researched ways to enable communication between Deaf individuals through the development of human-computer interfaces (HCI) for Deaf users, by means of sign language. Sign language resources were compiled to inform progress in the other research areas within the project, especially video recognition of signs, sign-to-sign translation, linguistic modelling, and sign generation. The aim for the corpus data collection was to achieve as high a level of naturalness as possible with semi-spontaneous utterances under lab conditions. At the same time the elicited data were supposed to be semantically close enough to be comparable both across individual informants and for all four sign languages. The sign language data were annotated using iLex and are now made available via a web portal that allows for different access options to the data.}
}

@inproceedings{collet:10058:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Collet, Christophe and Gonzalez, Matilde and Milachon, Fabien},
  title     = {Distributed System Architecture for Assisted Annotation of Sign Language Video Corpora},
  pages     = {49--52},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10058.html},
  abstract  = {This paper present one component of Dicta-Sign, a three-year FP7 ICT project that aims to improve the state of web-based communication for Deaf people. A part of this project is the annotation of sign language corpora. To improve the annotation task in terms of reproducibility and time consuming, several plug-ins for sign language video processing are developed. The component presented in this paper aims to link several plug-ins to annotation software through the network. These plug-ins can be coded in different languages, operating systems and computers. For that, it uses the SOAP Web-service and a specific data-format in XML for the data exchange.}
}

@inproceedings{efthimiou:10005:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Dimou, Athanasia-Lida and Kalimeris, Constandinos},
  title     = {Towards decoding Classifier function in {GSL}},
  pages     = {76--79},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10005.html},
  abstract  = {Here we will present work based on a corpus specially designed and elicited in order to provide data for the study of Classifier function in Greek Sign Language (GSL).
\par
Data elicitation was based on presentation to informants of a series of stimuli which lead to utterances entailing the set of Classifier functions met in the language.
\par
The whole set of video recorded data were annotated in order to provide an appropriate corpus for the investigation of Classifier instantiations. Annotation work was complemented by the use of a search tool external to the ELAN environment, which was developed in order to handle the whole of annotated material. This search tool allows to create a data base of annotated video clips, by exploiting the set of classification features used to annotate the video recorded data. Among the attribute-value pairs forming the complete set of annotation features used, the following tiers of annotation were adopted: a) "Discourse Unit", indicating the sentence or utterance in which a classifier is met, b) "CP{\_}{\_}{\_}{\_}" for marking the maximal classifier predicate, c) "CP{\_}GLOSS" to describe the semantic content of classifiers, and d) "HS" with font symbols as values for specifying the handshape or handshapes involved in signing. These tiers provide the necessary information to group pieces of data as to the different classifiers and classifier functions met in GSL, i.e. [Discourse Unit: various types of tables], [CP{\_}MAX: round tables of different sizes], [CP{\_}GLOSS: ROUND, FLAT, SIZE], [HS: D, L, B...].
\par
Theoretical analysis of the so created linguistic data supports formulation of a proposal for Classifier behaviour which differentiates among three distinguished major grammar functions. The key property that allows for a principled account of Classifier behaviour is that Classifiers are semantic markers which create semantic classes of objects recognised to share a set of common semantic features.
\par
In this line, we will argue that Classifiers are morphemes articulated according to SL phonology primes. According to our proposal GSL utilises Classifier morphemes in three distinct ways:\begin{enumerate}\item To create new lexicon items: Classifier affixation adds specific semantic properties to an entity, making it part of the semantic class this specific Classifier identifies.\item To add qualitative/quantitative values: Classifiers function as modifiers adding qualitative/quantitative values to syntactic heads or maximal phrases.\item To serve co-indexing: In sign utterances, Classifiers may be used as pronominal elements, where co-indexing obligatorily involves an expanded set of agreement features which, apart from the standard features "Number" and "Gender", also includes the feature "Semantic Class".\end{enumerate}}
}

@inproceedings{efthimiou:10027:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Glauert, John and Bowden, Richard and Braffort, Annelies and Collet, Christophe and Maragos, Petros and Goudenove, Fran{\c c}ois},
  title     = {{DICTA-SIGN}: Sign Language Recognition, Generation and Modelling with application in Deaf Communication},
  pages     = {80--83},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10027.html},
  abstract  = {Here we present the components and objectives of the EU funded project DICTA-SIGN. Dicta-Sign (http://www.dictasign.eu) is a three-year research project that involves the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, the University of Hamburg, the University of East Anglia, the University of Surrey, LIMSI/CNRS, the Universit{\'e} Paul Sabatier, the National Technical University of Athens, and WebSourd. It aims to improve the state of web-based communication for Deaf people by allowing the use of sign language in various human-computer interaction scenarios. It researches and develops recognition and synthesis engines for signed languages, aiming at a level of detail necessary for recognizing and generating authentic signing. In this context, Dicta-Sign aims at developing several technologies demonstrated via a sign language-aware Web 2.0. 
\par
Dicta-Sign supports four European sign languages: Greek. British, German, and French Sign Language and differs from previous work in that it aims to integrate tightly recognition, animation, and machine translation. All these components are informed by appropriate linguistic models from the ground up, including phonology, grammar, and non-manual features. 
\par
Expected outputs of the project include:\begin{itemize}\item A parallel multi-lingual corpus for four national sign languages - German, British, French and Greek (DGS, BSL, LSF and GSL respectively),\item A substantial multilingual dictionary of at least 1000 signs for each represented sign language,\item A continuous sign language recognition system that achieves significant improvement in terms of coverage and accuracy of sign recognition in comparison with current technology; furthermore this system will research the novel directions of multimodal sign fusion and signer adaptation,\item A language generation and synthesis component, covering in detail the role of manual, non-manual and placement within signing space,\item Annotation tools which incorporate these technologies providing access to the corpus and whose long term utility can be judged by the up-take by other sign language researchers,\item Three bidirectional integrated prototype systems which show the utility of the system components beyond the annotation tools application,\item A showcase demonstrator which exhibits how integration of the different components can support user communication needs.\end{itemize}}
}

@inproceedings{filhol:10003:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Filhol, Michael and Delorme, Maxime and Braffort, Annelies},
  title     = {Combining constraint-based models for Sign Language synthesis},
  pages     = {88--91},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10003.html},
  abstract  = {The framework is that of Sign Language synthesis by virtual signers. In this paper, we present a sign generation system using a variety of input layers, separated on two sides: an anatomical side and a linguistic side. In a first part we suggest a way of implementing the flexibility required by Sign Languages into the system by using combinations of necessary and suficient constraints. The anatomical side of the input specifies all morphological and articulatory constraints that model the behaviour of a human skeleton, while the linguistic input specifies language constraints (lexical, grammatical, iconic...) that must be applied to the signer's body to utter the correct sign sequence. A second part explains how to combine all these parts of the input in a conjunction of constraints for each time frame of the animation. A point is made that conflicting constraints may be given but that they need be prioritised in order still to decide on acceptable solutions. A first idea of a global priority order is given to illustrate this issue.}
}

@inproceedings{goulas:10008:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Goulas, Theodoros and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Efthimiou, Eleni and Pissaris, Michalis},
  title     = {{SiS-Builder}: A Sign Synthesis Support Tool},
  pages     = {102--105},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10008.html},
  abstract  = {Here we will present research work performed in the framework of the DICTA-SIGN project, closely related to Sign Language Synthesis and Animation and especially intended to cover for the need of creating lexical resources and evaluating them when performed by a signing avatar. Along these lines, a tool has been created to automatically generate SiGML transcriptions of any given HamNoSys string, as well as the relevant transcription file, by providing the HamNoSys characters of a sign.
\par
Users are allowed to create a phrase of up to 4 sign units, by introducing the corresponding HamNoSys notations in a sequence of appropriate fields. The related xml script is then automatically created, allowing also for on demand storage on the server.
\par
The here reported tool is web based, accessible by everyone, and allows users to interact with it without any special installations on the client side. Users may register, but this is not mandatory for use of the tool. Registered members can save their created scripts on the server in contrary to the non registered ones. Online and offline manuals are available to the users as well as a FAQ facility. 
\par
As regards further tool functionalities, users are also enabled to see the HamNoSys notation of a sign chosen from a validated list of lemmas or by entering the raw xml script in the proper field. Users are able to switch between SiGML data and HamNoSys notations on an instant by just selecting the wished function. This way, it is possible to test/ see the results of creation of a lexical item, either by consulting the HamNoSys sequence, for those familiar with the HamNoSys syntax, or by animating the results through the avatar with the use of the SiGML script.
\par
Users can create HamNoSys sequences by choosing the proper selection on the menu. This is a new feature, enhancing the tool's functionalities, added -upon completion of an evaluation phase- to allow users to create HamNoSys strings on line and then proceed with automatic creation of the corresponding SiGML scripts.
\par
Furthermore, along with the HamNoSys manual characters, users may add non manual characters to the creation of the SiGML script. If needed, users may add more than one movement of a particular body part, i.e. head or shoulders, to make animation look closer to natural signing. 
\par
The final step is creation of the script. The user is then able to copy and paste the script to the avatar page to visualise the results of the created sequence, the latter been performed by the avatar.
\par
Registered users are able to maintain/modify the data created by them. 
\par
The tool is based on open source internet technologies for easy access and compatibility. Technologies that have been used are mostly "php" and "java script".}
}

@inproceedings{hanke:10047:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Hanke, Thomas and K{\"o}nig, Lutz and Wagner, Sven and Matthes, Silke},
  title     = {{DGS} {Corpus} {\&} {Dicta-Sign}: The {Hamburg} Studio Setup},
  pages     = {106--109},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10047.html},
  abstract  = {Not taking into account budget restrictions, the setup of a sign language studio always is a balancing act between high quality recordings on the one hand not to make the transcription process even more complicated than it is anyway and possibly to enable automatic processing of the recordings, and on the other hand an environment where the informants still feel comfortable enough so that the recording situation does not have too much impact on the signing. In the case of the DGS Corpus project, an additional constraint is that the studio is to be relocated twelve times over the course of two years as it was decided to make the recordings in the regions instead of inviting participants to one central place to avoid dialectal mixing. One of the implications of this approach is that the studio is operated by non-specialist deaf fieldworkers with limited time available for training.
\par
Basically all tasks in the project involve two informants interacting in different ways with each other. A moderator (the fieldworker from the region) introduces the tasks and observes the conversation, but only interferes with the conversation if absolutely necessary.
\par
The camera setup we finally ended up with consists of seven cameras altogether, three on each informant and one for the whole scene including the moderator. Two HD cameras on the informant provide frontal and birds-eye views while a stereo camera mounted on top of the frontal-view camera provides footage that helps automatic processing. The seventh camera is an HD camera as well.
\par
In contrary to setups in earlier projects, we invite the two informants to sit down directly facing each other, with the frontal-view camera positioned above (and behind) the head of the other informant. Pre-tests revealed that with a distance of approximately three meters, the distorsion introduced by the elevated position of the camera does not negatively affect the transcription from video. Instead, this setting provides a front view of the informant similar to the addressee's, allowing to identify body shifts as well as direction of eye gaze more easily. At the same time, this constellation avoids informants targeting their signing back and forth between the addressee and the camera.
\par
Elicitation material and instructions are presented to the informants on screens located on the floor between them. A custom software, ``Session Director'' allows the moderator to present slides to the informants by the click of a button, and to keep track of the time elapsed for each individual task as well as the whole session. Using pre-recorded instructions and elicitation materials not only reduces the burdens on the moderator, but also makes sure that all informants get exactly the same input.
\par
Session Director keeps a log of all actions started by the moderator, allowing us to exactly reconstruct what task has been worked on when. This log is easily converted into tagging in our transcription environment, iLex. This not only allows automatic segmentation of tasks and pauses, but also introduces links from the transcript to the task and vice versa.
\par
Task descriptions for Session Director are kept as XML files, making it easy to use this freely available tool for other projects as well.}
}

@inproceedings{hanke:10056:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Hanke, Thomas and Storz, Jakob and Wagner, Sven},
  title     = {{iLex}: Handling Multi-Camera Recordings},
  pages     = {110--111},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10056.html},
  abstract  = {Until recently, sign language researchers were quite happy with just one or two views for each recording session. While ELAN allows the user to relate several media files to a transcript and to sync them, iLex just allows one single media container and relies on the container format, such as QuickTime, to group and sync several video streams into one container. In order to save screen real estate, iLex offers the user the possibility to switch on or off individual tracks within the media file. This works quite fine with two or three different views grouped, but fails to provide an adequate solution in multi-view projects such as Dicta-Sign or DGS Corpus with seven cameras altogether for a pair of informants. The advent of HD videos makes screen real estate really an issue: Even on very large screens, video competes with transcription space.
\par
Here we present a user interface study that allows flexible switching between video layouts whenever the transcription focus changes. Switching (including zooming and cropping) may be initiated at any point of time by the user, or can be automated to depend on tagging such as tasks or turns. This user interface is backed up by a server infrastructure providing videos in different spatial resolutions as needed for optimal display while saving transfer bandwidth and local processing power which even nowadays becomes an issue when dealing with several HD videos in parallel.}
}

@inproceedings{jennings:10011:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Jennings, Vince and Elliott, Ralph and Kennaway, Richard and Glauert, John},
  title     = {Requirements for a Signing Avatar},
  pages     = {133--136},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10011.html},
  abstract  = {We present the technical specification for an avatar that is compliant with Animgen, the synthetic signing engine used at the University of East Anglia for generating deaf signing animations. The specification will include both the basic definition required for any standard animating avatar, and the additional parameters that Animgen requires to generate signing. Avatars compatible with Animgen are created using the ARPToolkit, an application developed at UEA that has a plug-in architecture for tools that are used for rigging an avatar mesh for animation. The toolkit also generates the additional data needed by Animgen for each avatar.}
}

@inproceedings{matthes:10019:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Matthes, Silke and Hanke, Thomas and Storz, Jakob and Efthimiou, Eleni and Dimou, Athanasia-Lida and Karioris, Panagiotis and Braffort, Annelies and Choisier, Annick and Pelhate, Julia and Safar, Eva},
  title     = {Elicitation tasks and materials designed for {Dicta-Sign}'s multi-lingual corpus},
  pages     = {158--163},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10019.html},
  abstract  = {Within the framework of the Dicta-Sign project, parallelised sign language corpora are being compiled for four European sign languages (BSL, DGS, GSL, and LSF). The aim for the data collection was to achieve as high a level of naturalness as can be achieved with semi-spontaneous utterances under lab conditions. Therefore, informants were filmed in pairs interacting with each other. With respect to parallelisability, elicitation tasks had to be designed that result in semantically close answers without predetermining the choice of vocabulary and grammar. 
\par
The domain selected for Dicta-Sign is `Travel across Europe'. The tasks developed within the project cover different interaction formats ranging from monologues to sequences of very short turns, also with different levels of predictability. They include communication for transport by different means and contexts as well as related personal experiences. The elicitation materials are of different media formats and at various levels of complexity. They comprise of town and transportation network maps, pictures displaying a variety of places, items and situations linked to the target domain, as well as stories presented in sign language or as a picture story. In each session ten different tasks are to be performed, each of them planned to have a duration of about five to ten minutes, thereby switching roles between the informants several times during a recording session. 
\par
Taking into account cultural differences as well as language dependent issues regarding the different countries in the project, the material was designed in a way that only minor adjustments are needed that do not change the character of a task. The elicitation tasks and materials developed within the project as well as experiences gained adjusting and using the material for Dicta-Sign's different target languages are illustrated in this paper.}
}

@inproceedings{safar:10060:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Safar, Eva and Glauert, John},
  title     = {Sign Language {HPSG}},
  pages     = {204--207},
  editor    = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
  maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Valletta, Malta},
  day       = {22--23},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10060.html},
  abstract  = {We present an overview of some relevant aspects of sign language synthesis in the ViSiCAST project, which might serve as a possible basis for the Dicta-Sign project. Dicta-Sign is a 3-year EU-funded project, that undertakes parallel corpus collection in different Sign Languages (SLs) and fundamental research and development of sign recognition and generation techniques in order to open up new potential applications for sign language users. One of the aims in Dicta-Sign is to find a model that is suitable for both recognition and generation. In this paper we revisit the main aspects of the synthesis techniques implemented in ALE Prolog using a sign language specific HPSG with the view for future changes needed. We briefly describe the HPSG feature structure and the rules and principles of the grammar, which cover important SL phenomena like mode, prodrop, plurals, classifiers and signing space.}
}