Sign language resources are necessary tools for adequately serving the needs of learners, teachers and researchers of signed languages. Among these resources, the Swedish Sign Language Dictionary was begun in 2008 and has been in development ever since. Today, it has approximately 8,000 sign entries. The Swedish Sign Language Corpus is also an important resource, but it is of a very different kind than the dictionary. Compiled during the years 2009–2011, the corpus consists of video recorded conversations among 42 informants aged between 20 and 82, from three separate regions in Sweden. With 14 % of the corpus having been annotated with glosses for signs, it comprises total of approximately 3,600 different signs occurring about 25,500 times (tokens) in the 42 annotated sign language discourses/video files. As these two resources sprang from different starting points, they are independent from each other; however, in the late phases of building the corpus the importance of combining work from the two became evident. This presentation will show the development of these two resources and the advantages of combining them.
@inproceedings{mesch:12001:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Mesch, Johanna and Wallin, Lars and Bj{\"o}rkstrand, Thomas},
title = {Sign Language Resources in {Sweden}: Dictionary and Corpus},
pages = {127--130},
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/12001.pdf}
}