This paper describes a new online lexical resource and interactive tool for Israeli Sign Language, ISL-LEX v.1. The dataset contains 961 non-compound ISL signs with the following information: subjective frequency ratings from native signers, iconicity ratings from native and non-native signers (presented separately), and phonological properties in six domains. The selection of signs was also designed to reflect a broad distinction between those signs acquired early in childhood and those acquired later. ISL-LEX is an online interface built using the SIGN-LEX visualization (Caselli et al. 2022), and is intended for use by researchers, educators, and students. It is therefore offered in two text-based versions, English and Hebrew, with video instructions in ISL.

Coding and analyzing large amounts of video data is a challenge for sign language researchers, who traditionally code 2D video data manually. In recent years, the implementation of 3D motion capture technology as a means of automatically tracking movement in sign language data has been an important step forward. Several studies show that motion capture technologies can measure sign language movement parameters – such as volume, speed, variance – with high accuracy and objectivity. In this paper, using motion capture technology and machine learning, we attempt to automatically measure a more complex feature in sign language known as distalization. In general, distalized signs use the joints further from the torso (such as the wrist), however, the measure is relative and therefore distalization is not straightforward to measure. The development of a reliable and automatic measure of distalization using motion tracking technology is of special interest in many fields of sign language research.

The Corpus of Israeli Sign Language is a four-year project (2020-2024) which aims to create a digital open-access corpus of spontaneous and elicited data from a representative sample of the Israeli deaf community. In this paper, the methodology for building the Corpus of Israeli Sign Language is described. Israeli Sign Language (ISL) is the main sign language used across Israel by around 10,000 people. As part of the corpus, data will be collected from 120 deaf ISL signers across four sites in Israel: Tel Aviv and the Centre, Haifa and the North, Be’er Sheva and the South and Jerusalem and the surrounding area. Participants will engage in a variety of tasks, eliciting a range of signing styles from free conversation to lexical elicitation. The dataset will consist of recordings of over 360 hours of video data which will be used to conduct sociolinguistic investigations of language contact, variation, and change in the near term, and other linguistic analyses in the future.