A First Corpus of AZee Discourse Expressions

Camille Challant (1) , Michael Filhol (1)

1 ILES - Information, Langue Ecrite et Signée

This paper presents a corpus of AZee discourse expressions, i.e. expressions which formally describe Sign Language utterances of any length using the AZee approach and language. The construction of this corpus had two main goals: a first reference corpus for AZee, and a test of its coverage on a significant sample of real-life utterances. We worked on productions from an existing corpus, namely the 40 brèves, containing an hour of French Sign Language. We wrote the corresponding AZee discourse expressions for the entire video content, i.e. expressions capturing the forms produced by the signers and their associated meaning by combining known production rules, a basic building block for these expressions. These are made available as a version 2 extension of the 40 brèves. We explain the way in which these expressions can be built, present the resulting corpus and set of production rules used, and perform first measurements on it. We also propose an evaluation of our corpus: for one hour of discourse, AZee allows to describe 94% of it, while ongoing studies are increasing this coverage. This corpus offers a lot of future prospects, for instance concerning synthesis with virtual signers, machine translation or formal grammars for Sign Language.

Mots clés: AZee; Sign Language; Formal representation; Corpus

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Camille Challant, Michael Filhol. A First Corpus of AZee Discourse Expressions. Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Jun 2022, Marseille, France. ⟨hal-03714951⟩