Elena Jahn


2022

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Outreach and Science Communication in the DGS-Korpus Project: Accessibility of Data and the Benefit of Interactive Exchange between Communities
Elena Jahn | Calvin Khan | Annika Herrmann
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources

In this paper, we tackle the issues of science communication and dissemination within a sign language corpus project with a focus on spreading accessible information and involving the D/deaf community on various levels. We will discuss successful examples, challenges, and limitations to public relations in such a project and particularly elaborate on use cases. The focus group is presented as a best-practice example of a what we think is a necessary perspective: taking external knowledge seriously and let community experts interact with and provide feedback on a par with academic personnel. Showing both social media and on-site events, we present some exemplary approaches from our team involved in public relations. Keywords: public relations, science communication, sign language community, DGS-Korpus project

2020

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Extending the Public DGS Corpus in Size and Depth
Thomas Hanke | Marc Schulder | Reiner Konrad | Elena Jahn
Proceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives

In 2018 the DGS-Korpus project published the first full release of the Public DGS Corpus. This event marked a change of focus for the project. While before most attention had been on increasing the size of the corpus, now an increase in its depth became the priority. New data formats were added, corpus annotation conventions were released and OpenPose pose information was published for all transcripts. The community and research portal websites of the corpus also received upgrades, including persistent identifiers, archival copies of previous releases and improvements to their usability on mobile devices. The research portal was enhanced even further, improving its transcript web viewer, adding a KWIC concordance view, introducing cross-references to other linguistic resources of DGS and making its entire interface available in German in addition to English. This article provides an overview of these changes, chronicling the evolution of the Public DGS Corpus from its first release in 2018, through its second release in 2019 until its third release in 2020.

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SignHunter – A Sign Elicitation Tool Suitable for Deaf Events
Thomas Hanke | Elena Jahn | Sabrina Wähl | Oliver Böse | Lutz König
Proceedings of the LREC2020 9th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Sign Language Resources in the Service of the Language Community, Technological Challenges and Application Perspectives

This paper presents SignHunter, a tool for collecting isolated signs, and discusses application possibilities. SignHunter is successfully used within the DGS-Korpus project to collect name signs for places and cities. The data adds to the content of a German Sign Language (DGS) – German dictionary which is currently being developed, as well as a freely accessible subset of the DGS Corpus, the Public DGS Corpus. We discuss reasons to complement a natural language corpus by eliciting concepts without context and present an application example of SignHunter.