Utterance-Unit Annotation for the JSL Dialogue Corpus: Toward a Multimodal Approach to Corpus Linguistics

Mayumi Bono, Rui Sakaida, Tomohiro Okada, Yusuke Miyao

Abstract
This paper describes a method for annotating the Japanese Sign Language (JSL) dialogue corpus. We developed a way to identify interactional boundaries and define a ‘utterance unit’ in sign language using various multimodal features accompanying signing. The utterance unit is an original concept for segmenting and annotating sign language dialogue referring to signer’s native sense from the perspectives of Conversation Analysis (CA) and Interaction Studies. First of all, we postulated that we should identify a fundamental concept of interaction-specific unit for understanding interactional mechanisms, such as turn-taking (Sacks et al. 1974), in sign-language social interactions. Obviously, it does should not relying on a spoken language writing system for storing signings in corpora and making translations. We believe that there are two kinds of possible applications for utterance units: one is to develop corpus linguistics research for both signed and spoken corpora; the other is to build an informatics system that includes, but is not limited to, a machine translation system for sign languages.
Anthology ID:
2020.signlang-1.3
Volume:
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
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Eleni Efthimiou, Stavroula-Evita Fotinea, Thomas Hanke, Julie A. Hochgesang, Jette Kristoffersen, Johanna Mesch
Venue:
SignLang
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
13–20
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.signlang-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mayumi Bono, Rui Sakaida, Tomohiro Okada, and Yusuke Miyao. 2020. Utterance-Unit Annotation for the JSL Dialogue Corpus: Toward a Multimodal Approach to Corpus Linguistics. In 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, pages 13–20, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Utterance-Unit Annotation for the JSL Dialogue Corpus: Toward a Multimodal Approach to Corpus Linguistics (Bono et al., SignLang 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.signlang-1.3.pdf
PDF Search