Corpus-based Sign Language linguistics has emerged as a new linguistic domain, and as a consequence large-scale and controlled video data repositories are under construction for different Sign Languages. Nevertheless, as pointed by (Johnston, 2008) no unified annotation scheme is yet available, which compromises any chance of comparing or reusing corpora across research teams. Another related issue is the comparability of descriptions and formalizations between SL linguistics and mainstream linguistics. In this paper, we address the issue of the definition of a common annotation scheme for Sign Language corpora annotation, distribution, exchange and comparison. In section 2. we discuss the challenge of building inter-operable corpora for corpus-based linguistics. We also examine existing annotation schemes or strategies proposed for SL linguistics. In section 3. we propose a small set of annotation tiers, based on Frame-Semantics, as a common annotation scheme. We also propose to add text-level as well as utterance-level metadata to this common annotation scheme, in order to broaden the range of future uses of SL corpora.
@inproceedings{balvet:10046:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Balvet, Antonio},
title = {Issues underlying a common Sign Language Corpora annotation scheme},
pages = {15--18},
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/10046.pdf}
}