@inproceedings{varanasi-etal-2025-cross,
    title = "Cross-Linguistic Phonological Similarity Analysis in Sign Languages Using {H}am{N}o{S}ys",
    author = "Varanasi, Abhishek Bharadwaj  and
      Sinha, Manjira  and
      Dasgupta, Tirthankar",
    editor = "Hasanuzzaman, Mohammed  and
      Quiroga, Facundo Manuel  and
      Modi, Ashutosh  and
      Kamila, Sabyasachi  and
      Artiaga, Keren  and
      Joshi, Abhinav  and
      Singh, Sanjeet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Workshop on Sign Language Processing (WSLP)",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India (Co-located with IJCNLP{--}AACL 2025)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.wslp-main.9/",
    pages = "51--66",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-304-3",
    abstract = "This paper presents a cross-linguistic analysis of phonological similarity in sign languages using symbolic representations from the Hamburg Notation System (HamNoSys). We construct a dataset of 1000 signs each from British Sign Language (BSL), German Sign Language (DGS), French Sign Language (LSF), and Greek Sign Language (GSL), and compute pairwise phonological similarity using normalized edit distance over HamNoSys strings. Our analysis reveals both universal and language-specific patterns in handshape usage, movement dynamics, non-manual features, and spatial articulation. We explore intra and inter-language similarity distributions, phonological clustering, and co-occurrence structures across feature types. The findings offer insights into the structural organization of sign language phonology and highlight typological variation shaped by linguistic and cultural factors."
}