Sign Languages and the Online World Online Dictionaries & Lexicostatistics

Yu, Shi | Geraci, Carlo | Abner, Natasha

Volume:: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)
Venue:: Miyazaki, Japan
Date:: 7 to 12 May 2018
Pages:: 4235–4240
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
ACL ID:: L18-1668
ISBN:: 979-10-95546-00-9

Content Categories

Languages:: American Sign Language, British Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, Czech Sign Language, German Sign Language, Estonian Sign Language, Hong Kong Sign Language, Icelandic Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, Libras, Italian Sign Language, Spanish Sign Language, French Sign Language, Latvian Sign Language, Lithuanian Sign Language, Polish Sign Language, Portuguese Sign Language, Russian Sign Language, Swedish Sign Language, Taiwanese Sign Language, Turkish Sign Language, Ukrainian Sign Language, Austrian Sign Language
Corpora:: Spreadthesign
Dictionaries:: LSD Visual Sign Language Dictionary, NHK SL CG, TSL Online Dictionary

Abstract

Several online dictionaries documenting the lexicon of a variety of sign languages (SLs) are now available. These are rich resources for comparative studies, but there are methodological issues that must be addressed regarding how these resources are used for research purposes. We created a web-based tool for annotating the articulatory features of signs (handshape, location, movement and orientation). Videos from online dictionaries may be embedded in the tool, providing a mechanism for large-scale theoretically-informed sign language annotation. Annotations are saved in a spreadsheet format ready for quantitative and qualitative analyses. Here, we provide proof of concept for the utility of this tool in linguistic analysis. We used the SL adaptation of the Swadesh list (Woodward, 2000) and applied lexicostatistic and phylogenetic methods to a sample of 23 SLs coded using the web-based tool; supplementary historic information was gathered from the Ethnologue of World Languages and other online sources. We report results from the comparison of all articulatory features for four Asian SLs (Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Japanese SLs) and from the comparison of handshapes on the entire 23 language sample. Handshape analysis of the entire sample clusters all Asian SLs together, separated from the European, American, and Brazilian SLs in the sample, as historically expected. Within the Asian SL cluster, analyses also show, for example, marginal relatedness between Chinese and Hong Kong SLs.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Shi Yu, Carlo Geraci, Natasha Abner. 2018. Sign Languages and the Online World Online Dictionaries & Lexicostatistics. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), pages 4235–4240, Miyazaki, Japan. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{yu-etal-2018-sign:lrec,
  author    = {Yu, Shi and Geraci, Carlo and Abner, Natasha},
  title     = {Sign Languages and the Online World Online Dictionaries {\&} Lexicostatistics},
  pages     = {4235--4240},
  editor    = {Calzolari, Nicoletta and Choukri, Khalid and Cieri, Christopher and Declerck, Thierry and Goggi, Sara and Hasida, Koiti and Isahara, Hitoshi and Maegaard, Bente and Mariani, Joseph and Mazo,  H{\'e}l{\`e}ne and Moreno, Asuncion and Odijk, Jan and Piperidis, Stelios and Tokunaga, Takenobu},
  booktitle = {11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2018)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Miyazaki, Japan},
  day       = {7--12},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2018},
  isbn      = {979-10-95546-00-9},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/L18-1668}
}