This article presents a new French Sign Language (LSF) corpus called "Rosetta-LSF". It was created to support future studies on the automatic translation of written French into LSF, rendered through the animation of a virtual signer. An overview of the field highlights the importance of a quality representation of LSF. In order to obtain quality animations understandable by signers, it must surpass the simple "gloss transcription" of the LSF lexical units to use in the discourse. To achieve this, we designed a corpus composed of four types of aligned data, and evaluated its usability. These are: news headlines in French, translations of these headlines into LSF in the form of videos showing animations of a virtual signer, gloss annotations of the "traditional" type—although including additional information on the context in which each gestural unit is performed as well as their potential for adaptation to another context—and AZee representations of the videos, i.e. formal expressions capturing the necessary and sufficient linguistic information. This article describes this data, exhibiting an example from the corpus. It is available online for public research.
@inproceedings{bertinlemee-etal-2022-rosettalsf:lrec,
author = {Bertin-Lem{\'e}e, Elise and Braffort, Annelies and Challant, Camille and Danet, Claire and Dauriac, Boris and Filhol, Michael and Martinod, Emmanuella and Segouat, J{\'e}r{\'e}mie},
title = {{Rosetta-LSF}: an Aligned Corpus of {French} {Sign} {Language} and {French} for Text-to-Sign Translation},
pages = {4955--4962},
editor = {Calzolari, Nicoletta and B{\'e}chet, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric 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 Odijk, Jan and Piperidis, Stelios},
booktitle = {13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2022)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Marseille, France},
day = {20--25},
month = jun,
year = {2022},
isbn = {979-10-95546-72-6},
language = {english},
url = {http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2022/pdf/2022.lrec-1.529}
}