Visualisations have a long tradition in linguistics, as in many fields dealing with complex structure. New forms of representations have been introduced to Visual Linguistics in the recent past, e.g. to help the researcher find the needle in a haystack, i.e. corpus. Here we present visualisation services available in iLex making a combined corpus and lexical database visually accessible. While many approaches suggested for textual languages transfer to sign language data as well, others explore sign-specific structure, such as multi-dimensional concordances not being restricted to sequentiality. Experimental combinations of animated visualisation and image processing might support the researcher to compensate for incomplete high-quality (=manual) annotation. In the long run, we see the potential that visualisation and data manipulation go hand in hand, allowing future user interfaces that are less text-heavy than today’s sign language annotation environments.
@inproceedings{hanke:16024:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Hanke, Thomas},
title = {Towards a Visual Sign Language Corpus Linguistics},
pages = {89--92},
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/16024.pdf}
}
