Extracting Signs from Weakly Aligned Sign Language Corpora: A Study on LSF and LSM

de la Garza, Lorena | Halbout, Julie | Lascar, Julie | Martinez, Niels | Curiel, Arturo | Gouiffès, Michèle | Braffort, Annelies

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:: 174–183
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:: 26039
ISBN:: 978-2-493814-82-1

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for the automatic annotation of sign language data across different recording conditions, including original and interpreted content. The proposed approach integrates weak alignment, sign segmentation, and multiple instance learning with a contrastive loss. The resulting annotations are subsequently refined and filtered to enhance their reliability. Our method was applied to two historically related sign languages, French Sign Language (LSF) and Mexican Sign Language (LSM). This led to the creation of two signaries, comprising approximately 2k categories in LSF (25k occurrences) and 41 categories in LSM (1k occurrences). Both resources provide valuable support for future research in artificial intelligence and linguistics, particularly for comparative analyses between the two languages. A seminal analysis is presented as part of this paper.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Lorena de la Garza, Julie Halbout, Julie Lascar, Niels Martinez, Arturo Curiel, Michèle Gouiffès, Annelies Braffort. 2026. Extracting Signs from Weakly Aligned Sign Language Corpora: A Study on LSF and LSM. In Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 174–183, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{delagarza:26039:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {de la Garza, Lorena and Halbout, Julie and Lascar, Julie and Martinez, Niels and Curiel, Arturo and Gouiff{\`e}s, Mich{\`e}le and Braffort, Annelies},
  title     = {Extracting Signs from Weakly Aligned Sign Language Corpora: A Study on {LSF} and {LSM}},
  pages     = {174--183},
  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/26039.html}
}