Conference article

Universal Dependencies for Swedish Sign Language

Robert Östling
Mats Wire´n Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden

Carl Börstell
Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden

Moa Gaärdenfors
Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden

Mats Wirén
Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden

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Published in: Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, NoDaLiDa, 22-24 May 2017, Gothenburg, Sweden

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 131:43, p. 303-308

NEALT Proceedings Series 29:43, p. 303-308

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Published: 2017-05-08

ISBN: 978-91-7685-601-7

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

We describe the first effort to annotate a signed language with syntactic dependency structure: the Swedish Sign Language portion of the Universal Dependencies treebanks. The visual modality presents some unique challenges in analysis and annotation, such as the possibility of both hands articulating separate signs simultaneously, which has implications for the concept of projectivity in dependency grammars. Our data is sourced from the Swedish Sign Language Corpus, and if used in conjunction these resources contain very richly annotated data: dependency structure and parts of speech, video recordings, signer metadata, and since the whole material is also translated into Swedish the corpus is also a parallel text.

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