The Community and Ethics Shaping the Norwegian Sign Language Corpus

Ferrara, Lindsay

The Community and Ethics Shaping the Norwegian Sign Language Corpus

Ferrara, Lindsay

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:: 148–154
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:: 26005
ISBN:: 978-2-493814-82-1

Abstract

Recently, the Norwegian Sign Language Corpus has been published, and it includes language data from over 100 signers from around Norway. Collecting and building such multimodal signed language corpora have important implications for both research and deaf communities. However, consideration is needed to protect the personal nature of signed language data, while also making a long-term resource that is as accessible as possible to various community, research, and professional stakeholders. In addition, the potential exploitation of corpus resources by commercial and other interests, which are not necessarily aligned with the deaf community itself, must also be deliberated. Here, these seemingly opposing issues and the ethics that surround them are discussed. Current best practices in Open Science (including FAIR and CARE data principles), along with ethical discussions raised by scholars working, for example, in Deaf Studies, are shown to be important in navigating this complex research data landscape.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Lindsay Ferrara. 2026. The Community and Ethics Shaping the Norwegian Sign Language Corpus. In Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 148–154, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

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@inproceedings{ferrara:26005:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Ferrara, Lindsay},
  title     = {The Community and Ethics Shaping the {Norwegian} {Sign} {Language} Corpus},
  pages     = {148--154},
  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/26005.html}
}