From three-dimensional articulation in space to CLARIN:EL

To celebrate the International Day of Sign Languages (23 September), we dedicate this month to language resources which are hosted in the CLARIN:EL Infrastructure and constitute members of the Sign Languages Resource Family.

Eleni Efthimiou, Research Director at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the ATHENA RC, talks about the DICTA-SIGN Lexicon. In 1999, Eleni Efthimiou founded the ILSP Sign Language Technologies Team, and since then, she has focused on sign language data collection and processing, as well as on synthetic signing technology and the development of assistive tools and accessible interfaces, mostly addressing accessibility needs of the Greek Sign Language (GSL) users’ community. DICTA-SIGN Lexicon was created in the period 2009-2012 in the framework of the project Sign Language Recognition, Generation and Modelling with application in Deaf Communication (Dicta-Sign).

DICTA-SIGN Lexicon is a general language lexical/conceptual resource which contains a list of about 1000 concepts in Greek, English, French and German sign language with their translations in the spoken languages (Greek, English, French and German). All material can be accessed via a web interface accessible here, where native speakers videos are presented for each concept in the four sign languages. Each video is also annotated according to the Hamburg Notation System (HamNoSys)¹, which allows the resource to be used by sign language video search engines, as well as by sign language dynamic synthesis engines. The key feature of this resource, however, is that it was derived from the analysis of the first parallel multilingual sign language corpus, the DICTA-SIGN Corpus, allowing a parallel initial study of the mechanisms of meaning generation in the four sign languages it contains.

In the preview of the resource, right below, the concepts of Good/Happy and Autumn/Fall are presented in the Greek Sign Language, with an annotation to HamNoSys.

¹Hamburg Notation System, or HamNoSys, is a transcription system for all sign languages, comparable to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for oral languages.