Formalising Sign Language Depiction, Characterising Categories and Measuring Iconicity with AZee

Filhol, Michael; Martinod, Emmanuella

Formalising Sign Language Depiction, Characterising Categories and Measuring Iconicity with AZee

Filhol, Michael | Martinod, Emmanuella

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:: 164–173
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:: 26045
ISBN:: 978-2-493814-82-1

Abstract

This paper deals with depiction in (French) Sign Language, the formal account AZee can provide, and how it compares, validates or simplifies the linguistic notions of classifiers and iconic structures. It reports on a partial encoding work on "Mocap1", a corpus with a high density of depicting structures, following the same method that led to the first AZee reference corpus "40 brèves". The approach does not postulate classifiers or iconic structures as entities separate from lexical signs, and nonetheless manages to model the corpus data. We discuss the entailed possibility to rediscover some of the useful categories, and if so define them from AZee's premises. We also specify how a formal metric can be specified to measure iconicity in signed data. While this paper is of linguistic interest as it compares to existing theories, it also provides a concrete step to covering depicting discourse with AZee, therefore enable automatic SL animation of depiction.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Michael Filhol, Emmanuella Martinod. 2026. Formalising Sign Language Depiction, Characterising Categories and Measuring Iconicity with AZee. In Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 164–173, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{filhol:26045:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Filhol, Michael and Martinod, Emmanuella},
  title     = {Formalising Sign Language Depiction, Characterising Categories and Measuring Iconicity with {AZee}},
  pages     = {164--173},
  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/26045.html}
}