The direct involvement of deaf users in the development and evaluation of signing avatars is imperative to achieve legibility and raise trust among synthetic signing technology consumers. A paradigm of constructive cooperation between researchers and the deaf community is the EASIER project , where user driven design and technology development have already started producing results. One major goal of the project is the direct involvement of sign language (SL) users at every stage of development of the project’s signing avatar. As developers wished to consider every parameter of SL articulation including affect and prosody in developing the EASIER SL representation engine, it was necessary to develop a steady communication channel with a wide public of SL users who may act as evaluators and can provide guidance throughout research steps, both during the project’s end-user evaluation cycles and beyond. To this end, we have developed a questionnaire-based methodology, which enables researchers to reach signers of different SL communities on-line and collect their guidance and preferences on all aspects of SL avatar animation that are under study. In this paper, we report on the methodology behind the application of the EASIER evaluation framework for end-user guidance in signing avatar development as it is planned to address signers of four SLs -Greek Sign Language (GSL), French Sign Language (LSF), German Sign Language (DGS) and Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS)- during the first project evaluation cycle. We also briefly report on some interesting findings from the pilot implementation of the questionnaire with content from the Greek Sign Language (GSL).

The paper gives an account of an infrastructure that will be integrated into a platform aimed at providing a multi-faceted experience to visitors of Northern Greece using mythology as a starting point. This infrastructure comprises a multi-lingual and multi-modal corpus (i.e., a corpus of textual data supplemented with images, and video) that belongs to the humanities domain along with a dedicated database (content management system) with advanced indexing, linking and search functionalities. We will present the corpus itself focusing on the content, the methodology adopted for its development, and the steps taken towards rendering it accessible via the database in a way that also facilitates useful visualizations. In this context, we tried to address three main challenges: (a) to add a novel annotation layer, namely geotagging, (b) to ensure the long-term maintenance of and accessibility to the highly heterogeneous primary data – even after the life cycle of the current project – by adopting a metadata schema that is compatible to existing standards; and (c) to render the corpus a useful resource to scholarly research in the digital humanities by adding a minimum set of linguistic annotations.

Wordnets have been a popular lexical resource type for many years. Their sense-based representation of lexical items and numerous relation structures have been used for a variety of computational and linguistic applications. The inclusion of different wordnets into multilingual wordnet networks has further extended their use into the realm of cross-lingual research. Wordnets have been released for many spoken languages. Research has also been carried out into the creation of wordnets for several sign languages, but none have yet resulted in publicly available datasets. This article presents our own efforts towards an inclusion of sign languages in a multilingual wordnet, starting with Greek Sign Language (GSL) and German Sign Language (DGS). Based on differences in available language resources between GSL and DGS, we trial two workflows with different coverage priorities. We also explore how synergies between both workflows can be leveraged and how future work on additional sign languages could profit from building on existing sign language wordnet data. The results of our work are made publicly available.