Joanna Wójcicka


2026

The creation of large-scale sign language corpora is often bottlenecked by the labour-intensive process of multi-layered annotation that requires manual analysis. One of the annotation steps is the challenging and time-consuming task of segmenting continuous signing into clause-like-units (CLUs). In this paper, we propose an automated segmentation framework for Polish Sign Language (PJM) designed to support manual annotation. To detect sentence boundaries, we adapt the Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network (MS-TCN) architecture, enhanced with a Channel Attention mechanism, to effectively fuse multimodal skeleton features (hands, body, and face) extracted via MediaPipe. We evaluate the model on a diverse subset of the PJM Corpus (40 video files, 25 signers), containing nearly 16,000 manually annotated clauses prior to the start of this study. The proposed method achieves a Segmental F1-score of 75.43% at IoU = 0.10 and 57.52% at IoU = 0.50, demonstrating a strong capability in localising sentence boundaries. Furthermore, ablation studies reveal that fusing manual kinematics with non-manual prosodic cues (face) yields a significant performance gain (+13.6 pp) over unimodal baselines, empirically confirming the linguistic necessity of incorporating both manual and non-manual articulators in the process of sentence delimitation. The solution offers a viable means for reducing CLU annotation time by automatically generating high-quality clause boundary proposals.

2024

2022

Between 2010 and 2020, the research team of the Section for Sign Linguistics collected, annotated, and translated a large corpus of Polish Sign Language (polski język migowy, PJM). After this task was finished, a substantial part of the gathered materials was published online as the Open Repository of the Polish Sign Language Corpus. The current paper gives an overview of the process of converting the material from the Corpus into the Repository. If presents and explains the decisions made along the way and describes the process of data preparation and publication. There are two levels of access to the Repository, which are meant to fulfil the needs of a wide range of public users, from members of the Deaf community, through hearing students of PJM, sign language teachers and interpreters, to users with academic background. We describe how corpus material available in open access was prepared to be searchable by text type and elicitation tasks, by sociolinguistic metadata, and by translation into written Polish. We go on to explain how access for research purposes differs from open access. We present possible ways in which data gathered in the Repository may be used by members of the signing community in Poland and abroad.