In this article, we describe DGS-BIGEKO, a sign language dataset containing a conversation in a crisis scenario signed by a professional interpreter in German Sign Language (DGS). The dataset comprises 14 sentences with common questions and answers from protocols occurring in emergency call scenarios translated into DGS. Additionally, the dataset contains signs for an additional 108 concepts that are relevant to emergency call scenarios. The dataset is intended to support research in sign language linguistics and sign language machine translation by providing resources in a very specific domain, where no previous resources are available in DGS. The dataset is freely available for research purposes at the following address: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18458557

Emotion Recognition research in Sign Languages is still in its infancy. Still today, there exists a lack of knowledge about appropriate annotation guidelines and the impact that facial expressions, body postures and head positions have in recognizing emotions while signing, considering that sign language encompasses manual and non-manual cues with linguistic purposes. In this article, we present an acquisition protocol to record acted emotions in German Sign Language under four scenarios (High-Valence and High-Arousal, High-Valence and Low Arousal, Low-Valence and High-Arousal, and Low-Valence and Low-Arousal). The goal is to provide a reference dataset to explore the use of machine learning techniques for an automated classification of emotions in sign language utterances. As a baseline reference, we trained static models with features extracted from the facial muscle activations. The best model achieved an accuracy of 68.84% and a F1 of 67.96% with a random forest trained on the statistics extracted from Action Units. These results highlight the importance of facial expression in sign language, not only for carrying linguistic information but also for transmitting emotions. Results also indicate challenges in detecting emotions in the High-Valence and Low Arousal scenario, which suggests future investigation lines to explore.

We present a dataset and a model for sentiment analysis of German sign language (DGS) fairy tales. First, we perform sentiment analysis for three levels of valence (negative, neutral, positive) on German fairy tales text segments using four large language models (LLMs) and majority voting, reaching an inter-annotator agreement of 0.781 Krippendorff’s alpha. Second, we extract face and body motion features from each corresponding DGS video segment using MediaPipe. Finally, we train an explainable model (based on XGBoost) to predict negative, neutral or positive sentiment from video features. Results show an average balanced accuracy of 0.631. A thorough analysis of the most important features reveal that, in addition to eyebrows and mouth motion on the face, also the motion of hips, elbows, and shoulders considerably contribute in the discrimination of the conveyed sentiment, indicating an equal importance of face and body for sentiment communication in sign language.

Psychodynamic conflicts are persistent, often unconscious themes that shape a person’s behaviour and experiences. Accurate diagnosis of psychodynamic conflicts is crucial for effective patient treatment and is commonly done via long, manually scored semi-structured interviews. Existing automated solutions for psychiatric diagnosis tend to focus on the recognition of broad disorder categories such as depression, and it is unclear to what extent psychodynamic conflicts which even the patient themselves may not have conscious access to could be automatically recognised from conversation. In this paper, we propose AutoPsyC, the first method for recognising the presence and significance of psychodynamic conflicts from full-length Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics (OPD) interviews using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach combines recent advances in parameter-efficient fine-tuning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with a summarisation strategy to effectively process entire 90 minute long conversations. In evaluations on a dataset of 141 diagnostic interviews we show that AutoPsyC consistently outperforms all baselines and ablation conditions on the recognition of four highly relevant psychodynamic conflicts.

We present the acquisition process and the data of DGS-Fabeln-1, a parallel corpus of German text and videos containing German fairy tales interpreted into the German Sign Language (DGS) by a native DGS signer. The corpus contains 573 segments of videos with a total duration of 1 hour and 32 minutes, corresponding with 1428 written sentences. It is the first corpus of semi-naturally expressed DGS that has been filmed from 7 angles, and one of the few sign language (SL) corpora globally which have been filmed from more than 3 angles and where the listener has been simultaneously filmed. The corpus aims at aiding research at SL linguistics, SL machine translation and affective computing, and is freely available for research purposes at the following address: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10822097.

This paper presents an overview of AVASAG; an ongoing applied-research project developing a text-to-sign-language translation system for public services. We describe the scientific innovation points (geometry-based SL-description, 3D animation and video corpus, simplified annotation scheme, motion capture strategy) and the overall translation pipeline.