Aigerim Kydyrbekova


2024

pdf
Retrospective of Kazakh-Russian Sign Language Corpus Formation
Alfarabi Imashev | Aigerim Kydyrbekova | Medet Mukushev | Anara Sandygulova | Shynggys Islam | Khassan Israilov | Aibek Makazhanov | Zhandos Yessenbayev
Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources

2022

pdf
Crowdsourcing Kazakh-Russian Sign Language: FluentSigners-50
Medet Mukushev | Aigerim Kydyrbekova | Alfarabi Imashev | Vadim Kimmelman | Anara Sandygulova
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper presents the methodology we used to crowdsource a data collection of a new large-scale signer independent dataset for Kazakh-Russian Sign Language (KRSL) created for Sign Language Processing. By involving the Deaf community throughout the research process, we firstly designed a research protocol and then performed an efficient crowdsourcing campaign that resulted in a new FluentSigners-50 dataset. The FluentSigners-50 dataset consists of 173 sentences performed by 50 KRSL signers for 43,250 video samples. Dataset contributors recorded videos in real-life settings on various backgrounds using various devices such as smartphones and web cameras. Therefore, each dataset contribution has a varying distance to the camera, camera angles and aspect ratio, video quality, and frame rates. Additionally, the proposed dataset contains a high degree of linguistic and inter-signer variability and thus is a better training set for recognizing a real-life signed speech. FluentSigners-50 is publicly available at https://krslproject.github.io/fluentsigners-50/

pdf
Towards Large Vocabulary Kazakh-Russian Sign Language Dataset: KRSL-OnlineSchool
Medet Mukushev | Aigerim Kydyrbekova | Vadim Kimmelman | Anara Sandygulova
Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources

This paper presents a new dataset for Kazakh-Russian Sign Language (KRSL) created for the purposes of Sign Language Processing. In 2020, Kazakhstan’s schools were quickly switched to online mode due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Every working day, the El-arna TV channel was broadcasting video lessons for grades from 1 to 11 with sign language translation. This opportunity allowed us to record a corpus with a large vocabulary and spontaneous SL interpretation. To this end, this corpus contains video recordings of Kazakhstan’s online school translated to Kazakh-Russian sign language by 7 interpreters. At the moment we collected and cleaned 890 hours of video material. A custom annotation tool was created to make the process of data annotation simple and easy-to-use by the Deaf community. To date, around 325 hours of videos have been annotated with glosses and 4,009 lessons out of 4,547 were transcribed with automatic speech-to-text software. The KRSL-OnlineSchool dataset will be made publicly available at https://krslproject.github.io/online-school/