This paper discusses the process of creating corpora of the sign languages used in Finland, Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) and Finland-Swedish Sign Language (FinSSL). It describes the process of getting informants and data, editing and storing the data, the general principles of annotation, and the creation of a web-based lexical database, the FinSL Signbank, developed on the basis of the NGT Signbank, which is a branch of the Auslan Signbank. The corpus project of Finland ́s Sign Languages (CFINSL) started in 2014 at the Sign Language Centre of the University of Jyväskylä. Its aim is to collect conversations and narrations from 80 FinSL users and 20 FinSSL users who are living in different parts of Finland. The participants are filmed in signing sessions led by a native signer in the Audio-visual Research Centre at the University of Jyväskylä. The edited material is stored in the IDA storage service produced by the CSC – IT Center for Science, and the metadata will be saved into CMDI metadata. Every informant is asked to sign a consent form where they state for what kinds of purposes their signing can be used. The corpus data are annotated using the ELAN tool. At the moment, annotations are created on the levels of glosses and translation.
@inproceedings{salonen:16017:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Salonen, Juhana and Takkinen, Ritva and Puupponen, Anna and Nieminen, Henri and Pippuri, Outi},
title = {Creating Corpora of {Finland}'s Sign Languages},
pages = {179--184},
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/16017.pdf}
}