Seeing Who Is Signing and With Which Hand

Börstell, Carl

Seeing Who Is Signing and With Which Hand

Börstell, Carl

Volume:: Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion
Venue:: Palma, Mallorca, Spain
Date:: 16 May 2026
Pages:: 42–50
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:: 26004
ISBN:: 978-2-493814-82-1

Abstract

This study is a computer vision analysis of 4.5 hours of video data from 40 signers in the Swedish Sign Language Corpus, aiming to evaluate the reliability of classifying 1) who the main signer is at any given time during dyadic conversation, and 2) the dominant hand (i.e., handedness) of each signer. First, the distance moved by the hands of each signer is used to compare the manual activity between a) the two signers to determine whose hands are more active, and b) the hands of each signer to determine which hand is more likely to be dominant. Second, the height of the hands is used to compare their prominence in signing space between a) the two signers to determine whose hands are more prominent, and b) the hands of each signer to determine which hand is more likely to be dominant. The results show that while both distance and height approaches can reliably classify – individually or combined – the main signer in any segment of a conversation, the height approach is better at determining the overall handedness (right- or left-dominant) of signers. For the handedness classification, the optimal method turns out to be a two-step approach, first classifying the main signer per segment, then using only signer-relevant segments to classify handedness.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Carl Börstell. 2026. Seeing Who Is Signing and With Which Hand. In Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 42–50, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{borstell:26004:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {B{\"o}rstell, Carl},
  title     = {Seeing Who Is Signing and With Which Hand},
  pages     = {42--50},
  editor    = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2026} 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion},
  maintitle = {15th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2026)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Palma, Mallorca, Spain},
  day       = {16},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2026},
  isbn      = {978-2-493814-82-1},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/26004.html}
}