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10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages:

Multilingual Sign Language Resources

WORKSHOP IN WORKSHOP: Linguistic Linked Open Data for Sign Languages

Keynote: Thierry Declerck (DFKI Saarbrücken, Germany)

Abstract:

There is in the field of electronic lexicography an increasing interest in offering ways to represent and interlink lexical data originating from different modalities. This topic is particularly discussed within initiatives and projects concerned with the representation of lexical information in a Linked Data (LD) compliant format, so that they can be published within the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) cloud. In this context, we could observe that Sign Language (SL) lexical data are not represented in the datasets included by now in the LLOD cloud. Also looking at the “Overview of Datasets for the Sign Languages of Europe” published by the “Easier” European project we do not see any mention of a dataset being available in an LD compliant format.

Within the COST Action “NexusLinguarum: European network for Web-centred linguistic data science”, we are investigating the linking of lexical or corpus-based Sign Language information to the LD-compliant representation of spoken/written language lexical data, which is supported by the OntoLex-Lemon model.

In my presentation, I will describe the OntoLex-Lemon approach very briefly, and sketch the challenges we are facing, when it comes to the representation of constitutive elements of Sign Languages in this framework, hoping that we can establish for this endeavour a cooperation between both the Sign Language and the Linked Data communities.

References:

A high-level description of the LLOD cloud is given in Wikipedia.

A high level description of Ontolex is also given in Wikipedia.

And a “foundational” (in the sense of “historical”) paper: Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) Introduction and Overview by Christan Chiarcos, Thierry Declerck and John P. Mccrae.