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A Nordic Seminar “How Can We Use Sign Language Corpora?”

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A Nordic Seminar “How Can We Use Sign Language Corpora?” A Nordic seminar “How can we use sign language corpora?” 12–13 December 2013, Copenhagen, Denmark A Summary on the discussion held at the seminar At the seminar there were over 40 participants from five Nordic countries. Only Faroe Islands, Greenland and the Sami area were not represented. The purpose of the seminar was to discuss how sign language corpuses can be used by people working in different occupations or areas of interest, like research, language planning or guidance, lexicography, teaching and interpreting. The seminar was arranged by the Corpus working group, which is one of the three working groups that were set up after the first Nordic meeting of sign language planners in Copenhagen in March 2012 http://nordiskateckensprak.wordpress.com/2012/06/. The status of sign language corpus work in each Nordic country Sweden Sweden is the only Nordic country, which already has a sign language corpus. The corpus work has been conducted by the Sign Language Section at the Stockholm University. So far the largest corpus, 25 hours of signed dialogue, was gathered in a three-year project in 1999–2011. Of this material approximately five hours has been annotated with Swedish glosses and translations, and this material is at present freely available online (see information in Swedish http://www.ling.su.se/teckenspr%C3%A5kskorpus/information-om-korpusprojektet). In addition to this, Sign Language Section has currently two smaller-scale corpus projects. One on the tactile sign language (Signing space in tactile signing for persons with acquired deafblindness) and one on Swedish Sign Language as a second language (L2). Finland In Finland there are a few projects at the moment in which material for a corpus of Finnish and Finland-Swedish Sign Language is being gathered and produced. At the University of Jyväskylä in the Sign Language Centre professor Ritva Takkinen leads a project which aims to record up to 100 signers of which at least 10 is planned to be users of FinSSL. Ten FinSL users have been recorded already. Recordings are made in a studio with six cameras shooting from different angles. Both dialogue and monologue is being gathered and each signer is given the same eight tasks according to which they act during the recordings. In addition to Takkinen’s project, a smaller, special corpus will be compiled in Tommi Jantunen’s ProGram project 2013–2018. A third project in which recordings of FinSL signing are being made is a long-term collaborative study conducted by the Sign Language Centre and the Service Foundation for the Deaf . In this project it is researched how children, who use a cochlear implant, are adapting and using their two languages, FinSL and Finnish. For ethical reasons the recordings made in this project cannot be made available to anybody outside the project. In the Corpus and SignWiki Project (2013–2015) run by the Finnish Association of the Deaf and the University of Applied Sciences (Humak) new signed material is being recorded and already existing material will be prepared for the corpus. One main aim in the project is also to lay foundations for different ways of producing material for the corpus starting from user licenses, copyright issues, video formats, the metadata and different corpus tools, so that later, by following these procedures, anyone could take his/her material into the corpus. In Finland also the automatic recognition and annotation of sign language is being developed in the CoBaSil Project (2011–2014) at the Aalto University http://research.ics.aalto.fi/cbir/cobasil/. All the above listed parties co-operate with the FIN-CLARIN consortium https://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/FinCLARIN/KielipankkiFrontpage and all language material they produce or acquire will be deposited to the Language Bank of Finland. Norway Various Norwegian Sign Language material exists, but none of it has been taken to an archive or corpus where it could be easily accessed for different purposes. As examples of the existing material could be mentioned the signed news, Tegnspråknytt, produced by NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation http://tv.nrk.no/serie/tegnspraaknytt and the various material produced for the website of the National Association of the Deaf http://www.deafnet.no. National Library of Norway (Nasjonalbiblioteket) is now willing to archive the sign language material and to act as its distributor. At the present there are though no resources to do the concrete work of acquiring the material (choosing the material, writing the metadata, clear up the user rights, copyright issues etc.). Funding for a corpus project has been applied, but so far not succeeded. Iceland In Iceland funding for sign language corpus work has not yet been found. What is interesting is, that compared to bigger signer communities in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway, in Iceland it could be aimed to compile a concise corpus in the sense, that every member of the signing community could be filmed. There are on an average 200 deaf signers in Iceland. At the moment only the SignWiki site http://is.signwiki.org offers open access material of Icelandic Sign Language. In addition to the example sentences longer signed texts on varied issues has been published on the site. Denmark In Denmark funding for sign language corpus work has been applied for several times, but so far no money has been granted. Material that could be taken to the corpus exists scattered as in Sweden, Finland and Norway. Programs in sign language are being produced, e.g. by Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DR http://www.dr.dk/DR1/Tegnsprog/, and varied signed material is also published on the website of the Danish Deaf Association http://www.deaf.dk/. The online dictionary of DSL http://tegnsprog.dk/ is exceptional among the world’s sign language dictionaries in the sense that the example sentences are not only translated into Danish but also annotated by Danish glosses. Every sign that appears as a head sign of a dictionary entry or is used in an example sentence can be looked for where else in the example sentences it is used (click the button “K” in an entry; K = concordance). With this feature the Danish dictionary is not only a dictionary but also a small corpus. Faroe Islands and Greenland In Faroe Islands and Greenland no sign language corpus work has yet been conducted. In addition to the lack of funding they also lack the human resources, as there are no linguistically trained people who would know these sign languages. To collect and process material for the corpuses on the sign languages in Faroe Islands and Greenland may need a different kind of approach. Perhaps linguistic fieldwork collaboratively with another Nordic country? Nordic co-operation The last time we have had a seminar on the linguistic issues concerning the Nordic sign languages was at Stockholm University in 2007 and in 2008. The theme of those meetings was the dictionaries. Now, in this seminar, everybody agreed that it is time to refresh the Nordic co- operation, and it was decided to aim for a yearly meeting (seminar or workshop), which can have a changing theme like corpus work, dictionary work or producing of teaching material. The next meeting was agreed to be held in 2014 at the University of Jyväskylä (the Sign Language Centre, professor Ritva Takkinen). The practical arrangements will be shared between Stockholm University, Swedish Language Council and the University of Jyväskylä. It was also suggested, that besides these larger meetings, we could have a smaller-scale corpus co-operation going on between the Nordic corpus projects. It was also asked, that could it be possible to educate Nordic sign language interpreters, i.e. interpreters who could work in Nordic events? Encouraging people to start recording their sign language in various occasions was raised several times during the discussion. We should not only wait for the big, nice corpus project to start and to do all the work, but we all can contribute right away. One requirement though is, that one always gets a written permission from signers in which it is defined how and by whom the collected material can be used. Otherwise it can never be put to an archive or corpus. A Nordic co-operation was suggested for creating permission forms, which also the laymen can use. The forms that have been used in sign language corpus projects in Sweden and in Finland can be used as a starting point, but one has to bear in mind, that different countries may have differing regulations that has to be taken into account. What could we gain from the Nordic co-operation? It is well known that our Nordic sign languages are genetically related. Swedish, Finnish and Finland-Swedish Sign Language are related with each other, and so are also Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic Sign Language and the Sign Language of Faroe Islands and the one used in Greenland. In addition to this, deaf people in Nordic countries have long traditions of collaboration. It would thus be very interesting to get to know, e.g., how this history has left marks into our sign languages. What kind of differences and similarities there are? Further, in linguistics of spoken languages many linguistic phenomena has been much better understood when the structure of different languages has been compared. The same applies of course to the sign languages. Onno Crasborn suggested, that we use the web page of the Sign Linguistics Corpora Network http://www.ru.nl/slcn/ as a starting point when beginning the Nordic co-operation on corpus work. The old 16 and 8 mm films Probably in all Nordic countries various institutes and individuals have in their possession old 16 mm and 8 mm films from 1950s, 1960s and 1970s containing signing.
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