Several corpus projects for sign languages have tried to establish conventions and standards for the annotation of signed data. When discussing corpora, it is necessary to develop a way of considering and evaluating holistically the features and problems of annotation. This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework for the evaluation of the usability of annotations. The purpose of the framework is not to give conventions for annotating but to offer tools for the evaluation of the usability of the annotation, in order to make annotations more usable and make it possible to justify and explain decisions about annotation conventions. Based on our experience of annotation in the corpus project of Finland‘s Sign Languages (CFINSL), we have developed six principles for the evaluation of annotation. In this article, using these six principles, we evaluate the usability of the annotations in CFINSL and other corpus projects. The principles have offered benefits in CFINSL: we are able to evaluate our annotations more systematically and holistically than ever before. Our work can be seen as an effort to bring a framework of usability to corpus work.
@inproceedings{keranen:16016:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Ker{\"a}nen, Jarkko and Syrj{\"a}l{\"a}, Henna and Salonen, Juhana and Takkinen, Ritva},
title = {The Usability of the Annotation},
pages = {111--116},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2016} 7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Mining},
maintitle = {10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2016)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Portoro{\v z}, Slovenia},
day = {28},
month = may,
year = {2016},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/16016.pdf}
}