This paper deals with non manual gestures annotation involved in Sign Language (SL) within the context of automatic generation of SL. Movements of the eyes, eyebrows, mouth, cheeks and head involved in SL are defined as non manual gestures or NMG. Many researches in SL emphasize the importance of NMG at different language levels and recognize that NMG are essential for the message comprehension. However these researches canít explain and define enough the way that NMG operate. A specific NMG study should allow us to know when and how NMG are involved in meaning transmission and information comprehension, in order to design a formal description usable by automatic generation system. Our purpose is to have an objective and precise description of all NMG involved in French Sign Language (LSF). At present, non manual descriptions do not allow us to deal with and to observe the movement intensity and dynamics. Therefore, we propose a new annotation methodology of NMG. We position several 2D points on each frame of the video and export their coordinates x,y. These coordinates are used to obtain precise position of all NMGs frame by frame. Then, we use these data to evaluate the annotation by means of a synthetic face, for numerical analysis (by using curve), and, finally, to obtain numerical definition of each symbol of our set of annotation symbols based on arrows. A first annotation on the LS-COLIN corpus showed that this methodology is an answer to correctly address our purpose: All NMG can be described, with precision. Moreover, the movement dynamics can be analyzed, and each movement phase. All these results must be refined and confirmed by extending the study on the whole corpus. In a second step, our annotation will be used to produce analyses in order to define rules and a formal definition of NGM that will be evaluated in LIMSIís automatic LSF generation system.
@inproceedings{chetelatpele:08009:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Ch{\'e}telat-Pel{\'e}, Emilie and Braffort, Annelies and V{\'e}ronis, Jean},
title = {Annotation of Non Manual Gestures: Eyebrow movement description},
pages = {28--32},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Thoutenhoofd, Ernst D. and Zwitserlood, Inge},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2008} 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora},
maintitle = {6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2008)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Marrakech, Morocco},
day = {1},
month = jun,
year = {2008},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/08009.pdf}
}