✨️ 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
@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.
🎉 Lingualibre Google Summer of Code 2024 officially starting today ! Following successful application process, i'm honored to be a double GSoC mentor :
- On #SignIt web extension : Kabir, mentored by Ishan and myself. Fore better #signLanguages services.
- On #Lingualibre web app : Pushkar, mentored by @Poslovitch and myself. Documenting language diversity and musicality.
#GSoC24
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an annotator in possession of a growing sign language wordnet must be in want of improved annotation support. We added shared-meaning auto-suggestions to our annotation interface, then we annotated 3 of our 8 languages some more. Find out more in our new paper, “Signs and Synonymity” #SignLanguage #SignLanguages #Wordnet
https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24034.html
🤖🐲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.
"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."
Visit our websites
www.shrishtisoftech.com
#SignLanguages #Communication #Inclusion #DeafCommunity #LanguageDiversity #HandsSpeak #DeafCulture #LinguisticEquality #BridgeTheGap #GlobalCommunication #DiverseLanguages #SignLanguageDay #CulturalExpression #InclusiveCommunication #LanguageIsPower #UnityInDiversity #SignLanguageLove
On my way to #konvens2023 in Ingolstadt to hold my first ever conference keynote. Excitement! I will talk about what is like to do #ComputationalLinguistics for #SignLanguages. Many new challenges due to the different language modality and our responsibilities towards the deaf community. A lot of work goes into creating ressources before we can even think about applications. So many things to talk about in only 45 minutes.
#SignLanguage #NLProc
How did #SignLanguages develop? And are they similar to spoken languages? Dr Cornelia Loos is a research associate at the Institute of German Sign Language & Communication of the Deaf @unihh
Read about her work in #DAADLetter: ➡️ https://www.letter-daad.de/en/current-issue/adventures-in-linguistics/
4-year postdoc job opportunity! #linguistics #ComputerVision #SignLanguages
Research on sign language non-manuals at the University of Bergen 🇳🇴. Requirements: knowledge of computer vision methods and experience with sign language/gesture data.
Deadline: 20 Sept 2023!
Please share!
This is a day full of updates! The Sign Language Dataset Compendium is out in version 1.3: https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lr/compendium/
This adds three new resources and one new language, as well as plenty of improvements to the HTML and OLAC metadata. Most importantly though, the compendium is now also available as a PDF, plus associated DOI: https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.12017
Are you a data scientist interested in #SignLanguages? Are you a #SignLanguage linguist interested in #DataScience? Then join us in Hamburg on 25-26 September for our autumn school workshop! Registration is free and there are travel stipends available. Workshop languages will be English and International Sign.
https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/easier/easier-autumn-school.html
Finally got to writing a little tutorial describing some ways I use #RStats and #tidyverse for research on #SignLanguages
Paper time! Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are words that only occur in negated statements. They are assumed to exist in every language, but examples in #SignLanguages are still rare. @CorneliaLoos and I wanted to see whether we could find some for #GermanSignLanguage, so we combined her linguistic and my computational skills to comb the #DGSCorpus for NPIs. Did we find them? *drumroll* Yeahmaybekinda, but not the ones we expected!
Preprint at https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.12562
@bestiaexmachina Oh yes, #SignLanguages are full of puns and wordplay! It's been a while since I've studied them, so I can't think of any puns off the top of my head, but a well-known form of wordplay is the #ASL ABC Story, where the handshapes used in the story follow the American Manual Alphabet:
I truly enjoyed Christian Rathmann #IPrA2023 keynote on #signlanguages 🧏♀️ Many insights into conceptual space, language learning/change, creation/negotiation of communication systems, to name a few
Could numeral incorporation in German Sign Language be the result of grammaticalization? Me and my colleagues @DgsKorpus investigated and our conclusion is... probably not 😅 But we did find signs of ongoing language change and made other interesting observations!
👉 https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/8/2/153
Update time! The #SignLanguageDatasetCompendium has released version 1.2: https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lr/compendium/
It now covers 42 corpora and 81 dictionaries across 81 #SignLanguages. Navigation has been improved, allowing you to flip through entries without returning to the index. And *drumroll* the Compendium is now a metadata provider for the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC), helping to make sign language data more discoverable: http://www.language-archives.org/archive/compendium.lr.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de
In addition to all the languages I want to learn, I'd also like to get to a decent level in BSL. Don't necessarily need to be advanced, but it'd be nice to be able to have a conversation.
Just googled the cost of in-person courses though. Ouch!
I wonder if there's a more affordable online option out there.
#bsl #signlanguage #SignLanguages #deaf #language #langtoot @languagelovers
Update time! The sign-lang@LREC Anthology now includes not only all sign-lang@LREC papers as well as #LREC main conference papers about #SignLanguages, but also sign language papers from other LREC workshops, such as all SLTAT7 papers. Where available, posters and video presentations are included. Also, our index of covered languages, tools, datasets and projects has been updated to cover all newly added papers, introducing a new tool subcategory: Avatars! #SignLangLREC
https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/
