Dicta-Sign -Building a Multilingual Sign Language Corpus

Résumé En

This paper presents the multilingual corpus of four European sign languages compiled in the framework of the Dicta-Sign project. Dicta-Sign researched ways to enable communication between Deaf individuals through the development of human-computer interfaces (HCI) for Deaf users, by means of sign language. Sign language resources were compiled to inform progress in the other research areas within the project, especially video recognition of signs, sign-to-sign translation, linguistic modelling, and sign generation. The aim for the corpus data collection was to achieve as high a level of naturalness as possible with semi-spontaneous utterances under lab conditions. At the same time the elicited data were supposed to be semantically close enough to be comparable both across individual informants and for all four sign languages. The sign language data were annotated using iLex and are now made available via a web portal that allows for different access options to the data.