The SMILE Continuous DSGS Corpus: A Resource for Longitudinal Exploration of Continuous Swiss German Sign Language

Battisti, Alessia | Tissi, Katja | Sidler-Miserez, Sandra | Ebling, Sarah

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:: 17–30
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:: 26034
ISBN:: 978-2-493814-82-1

Abstract

This paper presents the SMILE Continuous DSGS Corpus, a longitudinal dataset that allows for investigating how hearing adults acquire Swiss German Sign Language as a second language. It includes recordings of sign language learners and native signer controls collected at four points over a period of 18 months and annotated for manual and non-manual components, errors, and sentence-level acceptability. The resource provides high-quality, synchronized video suitable for both linguistic and automatic sign language processing research, for example, supporting studies of interlanguage development and training of automatic sign language recognition models. We present here an exploratory analysis of the learner subcorpus using Bayesian mixed-effects modeling. The corpus and accompanying annotations are available for research purposes under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Alessia Battisti, Katja Tissi, Sandra Sidler-Miserez, Sarah Ebling. 2026. The SMILE Continuous DSGS Corpus: A Resource for Longitudinal Exploration of Continuous Swiss German Sign Language. In Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 17–30, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{battisti:26034:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Battisti, Alessia and Tissi, Katja and Sidler-Miserez, Sandra and Ebling, Sarah},
  title     = {The {SMILE} Continuous {DSGS} Corpus: A Resource for Longitudinal Exploration of Continuous {Swiss} {German} {Sign} {Language}},
  pages     = {17--30},
  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/26034.html}
}