✨️ New paper 📄
• Are there dedicated continuers (generic backchannels in conversation) in Swedish Sign Language?
• Can we identify potential continuers from corpus data?
• Do they have special form characteristics?
Yes, yes and yes!
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0025/html
In this paper, I use methods from corpus linguistics and computer vision to find candidates for continuers – that is, conversational markers that signal comprehension and encouragement to the primary speaker/signer to continue – in a corpus of Swedish Sign Language (STS). Using different methods based on distributional patterns in conversational turns, I identify a small set of manual signs – particularly the sign JA@ub ‘yes’ – that exhibit the characteristics associated with continuers, such as occurring frequently in repeated sequences of overlapping but noncompetitive turns. The identified signs correspond to those found in previous research on manual backchannels in STS, demonstrating that quantitative, distribution-based approaches are successful in identifying continuers. In a second step, I employ methods from computer vision to analyze a subset of the corpus videos, and find that the continuer candidates show interesting form characteristics: they are small in visible articulation and thus conversationally unobtrusive by often being articulated low and with little movement in signing space. The results show that distribution-based approaches can be used successfully with sign language corpus data, and that the nature of continuers exhibits similarities across modalities of human language.
@dnikub for the time being I expect generative text2sign will struggle as much (if not more) with the extreme data sparsity of #SignLanguages as all big data approaches do. Doesn’t help that on top of a text2speech equivalent text2sign also has to handle full machine translation.
An application with more tangible progress is the use of generative models to anonymise signers.
Also, I would be very wary of any supposed project success stories that do not have clear deaf involvement.
The Multilingual Sign Language Wordnet is the first publicly available wordnet resource for sign languages. It is a growing multilingual resource providing data for eight sign languages to...
🤖🐲Another long day with User:Dragons_Bot!
Months ago, I activated several #SignLanguages on #LinguaLibre. People can video record signed words. While doing activity stats, a #SPARQL query shown missing data on 467 languages items. Dragons_Bot just fixed those. Will be useful for incoming 3rd recording type for #WhistledLanguages. 😉
Today, I use Lingualibre Wikibase as a calm pad for coding my bot. Some days, I will move to #Wikidata for live editing on languages. 🎉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language
On International #SignLanguagesDay and EU #MultilinguamlismDay we join @EUD_Brussels in calling the EU to recognise national sign languages as EU languages.
The EU must support education and the availability of information in national #SignLanguages.
The EUD Calls the EU to Recognise the 30 EU National Sign Languages as EU Language 23 September marks not only the celebration of the International Day of Sign Languages or the organisation of the World Deaf Day by some EUD NADs but also the EU Multilingualism Day 2023! The EU Multilingualism Day is an […]
"International Day of Sign Languages is a testament to the power of hands to weave stories, convey emotions, and bridge the gap between silence and understanding."
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