Improving phonological distance measures for signs: the CatFormCompare tool

Morgan, Hope E. | Isard, Amy | Dang, Anh

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:: 341–350
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:: 26042
ISBN:: 978-2-493814-82-1

Abstract

This paper describes the CatFormCompare tool, designed to enable the comparison of phonological content between pairs of signs, especially in larger datasets. With this tool and a schema for coding categorical form (the SL CatForm coding schema), a pipeline is created that allows a feedback mechanism for advancing research—specifically by directly addressing one of the hard problems in sign language phonology: how to extract true minimal pairs from datasets coded for categorical form? Solving this problem would simultaneously improve phonological distance measurements for sign languages because it would mean that the units for measuring distance are grounded in the linguistic structure of the language and not simply a by-product of the coding system. Here we report on the tool and the first evaluation of its functioning.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Hope E. Morgan, Amy Isard, Anh Dang. 2026. Improving phonological distance measures for signs: the CatFormCompare tool. In Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 341–350, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{morgan:26042:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Morgan, Hope E. and Isard, Amy and Dang, Anh},
  title     = {Improving phonological distance measures for signs: the {CatFormCompare} tool},
  pages     = {341--350},
  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/26042.html}
}