While the research in automatic Sign Language Processing (SLP) is growing, it has been almost exclusively focused on recognizing lexical signs, whether isolated or within continuous SL production. However, Sign Languages include many other gestural units like iconic structures, which need to be recognized in order to go towards a true SL understanding. In this paper, we propose a newer version of the publicly available SL corpus Dicta-Sign, limited to its French Sign Language part. Involving 16 different signers, this dialogue corpus was produced with very few constraints on the style and content. It includes lexical and non-lexical annotations over 11 hours of video recording, with 35000 manual units. With the aim of stimulating research in SL understanding, we also provide a baseline for the recognition of lexical signs and non-lexical structures on this corpus. A very compact modeling of a signer is built and a Convolutional-Recurrent Neural Network is trained and tested on Dicta-Sign-LSF-v2, with state-of-the-art results, including the ability to detect iconicity in SL production.
@inproceedings{belissen-etal-2020-dicta:lrec,
author = {Belissen, Valentin and Braffort, Annelies and Gouiff{\`e}s, Mich{\`e}le},
title = {{D}icta-{S}ign-{LSF}-v2: Remake of a Continuous {F}rench {S}ign {L}anguage Dialogue Corpus and a First Baseline for Automatic Sign Language Processing},
pages = {6040--6048},
editor = {Calzolari, Nicoletta and Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric B{\'e}chet and Blache, Philippe and Choukri, Khalid and Cieri, Christopher and Declerck, Thierry and Goggi, Sara and Isahara, Hitoshi and Maegaard, Bente and Mariani, Joseph and Mazo, H{\'e}l{\`e}ne and Moreno, Asuncion and Odijk, Jan and Piperidis, Stelios},
booktitle = {12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2020)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Marseille, France},
day = {11--16},
month = may,
year = {2020},
isbn = {979-10-95546-34-4},
language = {english},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.740}
}