We describe an on-going project to develop a lexical database of American Sign Language (ASL) as a tool for annotating ASL corpora collected in the United States. Labs within our team complete locally chosen fields using their notation system of choice, and pick from globally available, agreed-upon fields, which are then merged into the global database. Here, we compare glosses in the database to annotations of spontaneous child data from the BiBiBi project (Chen Pichler et al., 2010). These comparisons validate our need to develop a digital link between the database and corpus. This link will help ensure that annotators use the appropriate ID-glosses and allow needed glosses to be readily detected (Johnston, 2011b; Hanke and Storz, 2008). An ID-gloss database is essential for consistent, systematic annotation of sign language corpora, as (Johnston, 2011b) has pointed out. Next steps in expanding and strengthening our database’s connection to ASL corpora include (i) looking more carefully at the source of data (e.g. who is signing, language background, age, region, etc.), (ii) taking into account signing genre (e.g. presentation, informal conversation, child-directed etc), and (iii) confronting the matter of deixis, gesture, depicting verbs and other constructions that depend on signing space.
@inproceedings{fanghella:12026:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Fanghella, Julia and Geer, Leah and Henner, Jonathan and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Lillo-Martin, Diane and Mathur, Gaurav and Mirus, Gene and Pascual-Villanueva, Pedro},
title = {Linking an {ID-gloss} database of {ASL} with child language corpora},
pages = {57--62},
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/12026.pdf}
}