Sentiment Analysis of German Sign Language Fairy Tales

Nunnari, Fabrizio | Jain, Siddhant | Gebhard, Patrick

Volume:: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2026)
Venue:: Palma, Mallorca, Spain
Date:: 11 to 16 May 2026
Pages:: 9525–9534
Publisher:: ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Licence:: CC BY-NC 4.0
DOI:: 10.63317/3cyfzw6vs9oe
ISBN:: 978-2-493814-49-4

Abstract

We present a dataset and a model for sentiment analysis of German sign language (DGS) fairy tales. First, we perform sentiment analysis for three levels of valence (negative, neutral, positive) on German fairy tales text segments using four large language models (LLMs) and majority voting, reaching an inter-annotator agreement of 0.781 Krippendorff’s alpha. Second, we extract face and body motion features from each corresponding DGS video segment using MediaPipe. Finally, we train an explainable model (based on XGBoost) to predict negative, neutral or positive sentiment from video features. Results show an average balanced accuracy of 0.631. A thorough analysis of the most important features reveal that, in addition to eyebrows and mouth motion on the face, also the motion of hips, elbows, and shoulders considerably contribute in the discrimination of the conveyed sentiment, indicating an equal importance of face and body for sentiment communication in sign language.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Fabrizio Nunnari, Siddhant Jain, Patrick Gebhard. 2026. Sentiment Analysis of German Sign Language Fairy Tales. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2026), pages 9525–9534, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{nunnari-etal-2026-fairy:lrec,
  author    = {Nunnari, Fabrizio and Jain, Siddhant and Gebhard, Patrick},
  title     = {Sentiment Analysis of {German} {Sign} {Language} Fairy Tales},
  pages     = {9525--9534},
  editor    = {Piperidis, Stelios and Bel, N{\'u}ria and van den Heuvel, Henk and Ide, Nancy and Krek, Simon and Toral, Antonio},
  booktitle = {15th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2026)},
  publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Palma, Mallorca, Spain},
  day       = {11--16},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2026},
  isbn      = {978-2-493814-49-4},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-748},
  doi       = {10.63317/3cyfzw6vs9oe}
}