This paper lists, evaluates and discuss the solutions to encode SW in Unicode. SignWriting is the most complex and popular writing formalism for sign languages. Unicode is the most popular encoding of characters aimed at unifying the various language-oriented encodings into a single format supporting every human language. This paper focuses on the first functional layer, which gives a correspondence between a SignWriting sign and a series of bytes. This is one of the prerequisites to represent a sign language electronically. The different possibilities to encode a given SignWriting sign are evaluated and compared on different criteria : the Unicode space requirements, the number of bytes the storage will require, the mathematical complexity and the side advantages offered. Keeping as much as possible of the information on how signs are written and entered, and offering capabilities to easily compare the symbols that compose these signs is also considered, so that the encoding can serve to study and compare how SignWriting is written. A reference encoding is then proposed, to serve as a basis for the next layers. Other bi-dimensional writing formalisms, currently not supported by Unicode, are considered to extend the presented work.
@inproceedings{aznar:06012:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Aznar, Guylhem and Dalle, Patrice},
title = {Analysis of the Different Methods to Encode {SignWriting} in Unicode},
pages = {59--63},
editor = {Vettori, Chiara},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2006} 2nd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Lexicographic Matters and Didactic Scenarios},
maintitle = {5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2006)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Genoa, Italy},
day = {28},
month = may,
year = {2006},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/06012.pdf}
}