An Annotation Formalism for a French–LSF Bilingual Corpus Supporting Sign Language Generation

Gibet, Sylvie | Reverdy, Clément | Marteau, Pierre-François

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:: 184–192
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
sign-lang ID:: 26046
ISBN:: 978-2-493814-82-1

Abstract

This paper introduces an annotation formalism for bilingual corpora of written French and French Sign Language (LSF), based on a manually-produced, expert transcription of LSF video data. The formalism captures the grammatical specificities of LSF, including spatial and iconic mechanisms, while explicitly encoding features that support motor programs for animated signing avatars. We propose a parameterized gloss-based approach, called PGloss-LSF, which integrates syntactic and semantic structures alongside motion features critical for accurate sign synthesis. We illustrate the framework with examples drawn from our bilingual corpus. The annotation process is incremental, ensuring internal consistency and computational tractability through a two-step evaluation: a qualitative assessment aligning generated signs with the annotation language, and a quantitative evaluation via automatic translation using large language models. By bridging the linguistic specificities of sign language with the computational requirements of sign synthesis, this work advances the integration of sign language corpora into multilingual resources and contributes to the standardization of sign language technologies.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Sylvie Gibet, Clément Reverdy, Pierre-François Marteau. 2026. An Annotation Formalism for a French–LSF Bilingual Corpus Supporting Sign Language Generation. In Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 184–192, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{gibet:26046:sign-lang:lrec,
  author    = {Gibet, Sylvie and Reverdy, Cl{\'e}ment and Marteau, Pierre-Fran{\c c}ois},
  title     = {An Annotation Formalism for a {French--LSF} Bilingual Corpus Supporting Sign Language Generation},
  pages     = {184--192},
  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/26046.html}
}